Day 58. The Coppices

          A coppice on Park Farm.

Timber provided the raw material for houses, tools, fires, furniture, gates, farm equipment, shoes, baskets and countless other products for many centuries. After the Enclosures in the 1750s, (see Day 54) areas were designated as coppices and planted with trees – oak, ash, hazel and birch to name a few –  to provide each farm with the raw materials it needed and others which could be sold.
Coppices can still be seen in many fields although their trees are mostly overgrown or fallen. 'Coppice Ground' is a commonly found field name, often where no coppice now remains (see Day 56).

To harvest the wood, the straight stems of the young trees were cut through, either at ground level or at six feet up, known as coppicing and pollarding respectively. Rather than killing the tree, this encouraged it to send out many new stems which in time would be harvested themselves. Pollarding prevented deer and other animals browsing the vulnerable new stems.

 The regrowth of a coppiced tree.

Each species had its own management needs. Hazel, used for fencing and hedge-laying, could be harvested every six years. Birch, mainly used for brooms, needed a little longer. Oak, used for furniture and tanning, is slow-growing and was cut every 25 years. 

Farmers and farm labourers were necessarily skilled at this work.  Other men forged a full-time occupation from woodcrafts. Ray Russell from Whitchurch was a sheep hurdle-maker in the 20^th century. He would regularly buy trailer-loads of 'withies' (willow stems) from Harry Smith at Lower Farm.  Ray would sing as he worked, most often a song from Shakespeare's The Tempest:

Where the bee sucks, suck I.
In a cowslip's bell I lie.
Several woodsmen were employed on Alscot Estate, and the craft, which relied heavily on intuitive experience, was often carried on from father to son for several generations.

Woodland crafts largely died out in the 20^th century as plastic and metal replaced wooden products. The coppiced trees now grow freely, untouched for fifty or a hundred years. The multiple thick trunks, sometimes now twelve inches in diameter, shooting from a single butt betray a tree's former use for coppicing in once-managed woodland.