The Wisdom of Trees
Page 10
The supreme age of woodcraft was inspired more by the boat than by the house. In 1937 a Bronze Age boat was discovered on the banks of the River Humber in the East Riding of Yorkshire; it had been made from oak planks more than forty feet long and three or four inches thick, sewn together with yew withies. The seams were caulked with moss. A reconstruction of this extraordinary six-ton craft, using only the technology available to the original builders, has recently undergone sea trials in Falmouth harbour, in Cornwall. Morgawr, as she is called after a legendary West Country sea monster, has proved, after a good soaking in sea water, to be both adequately watertight and sea-worthy when paddled and steered by a crew of twenty. Whether she was capable of more than estuarine travel is hard to say; but we know that there was cross-Channel travel during the Bronze Age. These were intrepid folk.
In the summer of 2013, on the edge of the peaty fens just east of Peterborough, no fewer than eight Bronze Age boats were found lying in a creek, which, three-and-a-half-thousand years ago, had been a tributary of the River Nene. The boats had been deliberately sunk by removing their transoms, the boards that form the stern of the vessel. This sinking is likely to have been designed to protect the boats from rot out of season; we cannot say why their owners never reclaimed them. The longest is about thirty feet in length, hewn from a single oak trunk. Another had been built from a lime tree. One was decorated with carved criss-cross lines; another had had a small fire lit inside, perhaps to cook a catch of fish. The builder’s skill is vividly demonstrated by the fact that the wood had been scooped out to leave a hull the thickness of just a human finger. The boats were found in such superb condition that one of them was capable of being floated into its scaffolding cradle to be taken for conservation.
Summer
In the woods in summer, the feller’s saw falls silent. It is the season for making things, and making them outdoors. Cords of firewood are seasoning; as one passes a stack one rubs a thumb against the cut end of a log, puts it to one’s lips and feels its moisture content dropping a little week by week as radial cracks appear. The wood smells different too; less sappy, more resinous and waxy. There is a musk in the dense, unmoving air where flies cavort and butterflies dangle as if on invisible strings; there is a hum of bees foraging in their mystical, industrious dance.
Stacks of greenwood wait to be split for use in turning and furniture-making, building and repair. The first tools to come out of the shed are the froe and mallet. The mallet has either been hewn with an axe or turned on a lathe; it is fundamental in material, construction and purpose—unchanging over the generations. The froe is a single-edged blade, a foot or so long, with a handle inserted at right angles the opposite way in which an axe would be hafted. Holding the handle upright, with the blade horizontal and facing down, you strike the back of the blade with a mallet and split a log lengthways into two, then four. The quarter split is an essential first step in converting a billet of wood or a log. Wood, as it seasons, fractures tangentially, so if you make any object in the round it will split. Quarter the log and you have done the splitting on its behalf.
Quarter-logs are trimmed to something approximating a cylinder using a side-axe, with a bevel on only one edge of the blade. In experienced hands it is a tremendously effective tool in roughing out shapes, from bowls to spoons and tool handles. Like all other tools it has to be kept razor sharp or it is useless. Many modern high-quality tools are made bespoke by local smiths in small charcoal forges, from such cast-offs as Land Rover leaf springs, which are made of high-quality tensile steel. My friend Matthew Taylor has just made me a froe out of such a piece; more alarmingly, he has also made my son Jack a devilish-looking parang—a sort of machete. It is not exactly traditional, but it is highly effective as a lightweight billhook and general slasher in the woods.
A billet quartered with the froe and trimmed with a side axe is ready, if it is destined to go on a pole-lathe, for the shaving horse. This is a wooden foot-operated vice (another simple, essential machine). It consists of a long, narrow bench on three legs, which the woodsman sits astride. At one end two parallel swinging arms are borne on a horizontal axle drilled through the bench’s surface. The lower ends of the two arms are joined with a long peg, which also acts as the foot-rest. The top ends are joined by a rougher peg, which, when the feet push against the rest, presses down on the piece of wood to be shaped and grips it against a wedge mounted on the bench. Now the woodsman’s two hands are free to deploy the drawknife, a single-bladed plane with two handles. This is drawn towards the chest (but you can’t hurt yourself because the handles get in the way) and along the billet, shaping it while it is still green and a little sappy into something very close to a cylinder. Pegs, chair legs, bespoke joints, barrel staves, axles, wheel spokes and all sorts of other useful shapes can be made or roughed out on the shaving horse, the first and most important jig in the woodsman’s hut; the lathe merely refines and perfects. Who knows how old these things are? But the first object milled on a lathe, the first chair, the spindle—all imply the existence of these devices and the craft, experience and mindset that goes with them, as well as the satisfaction and aesthetic pleasure.
And meanwhile summer’s greens and pinks, the drone of insects, the growing nuts and fruits, the fledging of offspring and the fattening of livestock go on as a backdrop to the rhythms of the woodsman. One day he looks up and feels a breeze with a slight chill in it. He watches a leaf floating across his vision or the propeller-blade of a sycamore seed. There is a pile of hurdles waiting for sale; the cord of wood has seasoned; bags of charcoal, stacks of bowls, the odd rustic gate and a chair lie waiting for collection. It will soon be time for the wheel of the seasons to roll once more, to sharpen the billhook and prepare for the woodsman’s season: autumn.
The first carpenters
The sophisticated wood-working skills of the Bronze Age and Iron Age (the latter roughly 1600 BC to AD 100) show how pivotal wood was to the lives of early farmers. I remember excavating a prehistoric wetland site in South Yorkshire in the 1980s and coming upon a row of perfectly preserved stakes, which had been driven into a bank to form a palisade. Their sharpened points still bore the axe and adze marks of the people who had cut and trimmed them from a local woodland two-thousand years ago. In that sort of situation one experiences an intense feeling of connection with real people in the past: these are the fingerprints of our ancestors. It has long been thought that such skills arrived with the early metalworkers, since bronze and iron take a good hard edge for felling and shaping trees. So how did earlier farmers of the Neolithic cope with mere stone axes?
SYCAMORE
Like weeds, trees are pests when some people don’t like them. The sycamore produces excellent firewood, fine veneers, wonderfully pale white wood which works like a dream when green, and is generally inoffensive. Leave it be, I say.
Thanks to very recent excavations in Eastern Germany, we now know. Across a range of early settlement sites—from the mid-sixth century BC onwards—archaeologists have been excavating the villages of a people they call (in typically dry academic fashion) the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) culture, after the linear patterns with which they decorated their pottery. Their longhouses are known from the pattern of post-holes left behind in the ground after the buildings themselves collapsed, but until very recently we did not know whether these houses were of the shabby lean-to variety or something more sophisticated. After all, stone tools are primitive, brittle, blunt… right? The first true carpenters used metal tools, surely?
Wrong. The excavators of these new sites have found wells lined with timber that survives in such a good state of preservation that they have been able to date them very accurately using dendrochronology, revealing that Neolithic farmers were also joiners. Here are mortise-and-tenon joints of the sort still used in construction and furniture today; coggle joints too, very simple cutaways that lap one section of timber onto another at right angles (like those cheap DIY bookshelves that one can buy in flat-packs)
. Where tenons had protruded beyond the mortise, they had been pierced and pegged to prevent slipping, rather in the way that old-fashioned rustic benches were—and are still—made. Not only that, but some of the wells were lined with hollowed-out lime trunks. These well-linings, some of them up to twenty-three feet deep, were fashioned with nothing more sophisticated than a range of stone adzes and the judicious use of charcoal fires. The smaller holes were made using stone chisels, the manufacture of which is no mean feat. Examination of the timbers showed that oak trees up to three-hundred years old and over three feet across had been felled and split with axe and wedge before being cut, trimmed and pierced with adzes. Such skills supported communities that grew two types of early wheat and cultivated patches of beans, lentils and soft fruit (while they were getting high on henbane, apparently). The conditions that preserved such superb evidence also showed that potters were repairing their pots with birch tar: so these communities, more than seven-thousand years ago, had a rich technological repertoire, with the management of woodlands as a key component.
Stonehenge decoded?
The farmers of the Neolithic and Bronze Age may have been hell-bent on clearing land of trees to plant crops; but they were still woodsmen. Their understanding of trees and wood, how to persuade the wildwood to produce the materials they needed while maintaining it for wildlife and foraging, was sophisticated. We naturally obsess, when we think of those remote periods, about the impressive megalithic monuments—the chambered tombs and henges, the great avenues of standing stones—which still adorn the bare landscapes of plain and mountain moor. Nothing inspires more awe than Stonehenge: it is a unique monument in a unique archaeological landscape. Other monuments, very many of them, were constructed from wood, and I am not alone in my suspicion that if wooden enclosures like Seahenge (see below) represented the spirits of the living, then the great stones that stand on Salisbury Plain might have embodied the souls of the dead. We will never know for sure; nor will we know whether they were laughing or crying when they practised their rituals or festivals there.
One of the recurring questions that Stonehenge poses is how its bluestones, brought from Pembrokeshire in Wales a hundred-and-sixty miles away, were transported so far. Stonehenge was a communal monument, drawing people and livestock from across the British Isles (and beyond), so it’s no surprise that these massive stones should in some way represent that communality. But how did they get there?
Here’s my theory. Large parts of the journey must have been accomplished using rafts along the various rivers—Avon, Severn and so on—that lie between the Bristol Channel and the site. Maybe some of those journeys were carried out when the rivers were frozen: ice is a good lubricant for a sled. A recent theory suggests that the stones may even have arrived in the vicinity on the back of a glacier during the last Ice Age. Even so, those stones still had to be moved across land. Many attempts have been made to reconstruct the task; none, it seems to me, has been satisfactory because they have deployed modern mindsets and labour, and have approached the task from an engineering point of view. I think the builders of Stonehenge thought like woodsmen and adopted a woody solution—the original henge on the site was, after all, a wooden structure.
The old idea of using rollers might have worked in limited circumstances but anyone who has tried it knows that the smallest obstruction renders the exercise impossible: a log will not roll over a stump. So, here’s how to move a stone that weighs somewhere between two and four tons. Cut the stone to shape on site to get rid of excess weight. You are left with a long, elongated cuboid. Lift the stone onto trestles with levers. Wrap both ends of the stone with several loose circles of rope, made of hemp or honeysuckle (both are known in a Bronze Age context). Now pack the space between those circles of rope and the stone with hazel rods a couple of feet long, until the ropes are absolutely taut. In the act of doing this, you will have created something very like a wheel at either end with the stone acting as its own axle, and you can now roll your stone—I won’t say with ease, because the whole enterprise is ludicrously difficult to imagine—with the additional means of controlling ropes (honeysuckle, hemp again) and brakes (the wedge) where necessary.
The Nobel Prize-winning woodworker
Retired politicians are often more popular than when they enjoyed high office. I have always had a sneaking admiration for Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, who pursued life as a submariner and peanut-farmer before heading from Georgia to Washington in 1976. Whatever his merits and record during his stint as the most powerful man in the world, he has, since retirement, been a busy man. At around ninety years old, he seems to pop up everywhere, from Palestine to Africa, China to Europe, endlessly campaigning for peace, justice and equality. He shares with a select group—including Churchill, Mandela and de Klerk, and Obama—the distinction of being a Nobel Prize-winning world leader. He works (and I mean works, as he and his wife Rosalynn get their hands dirty in the cause) for a charity that helps impoverished people across the world build their own houses. He also cuts down the occasional tree in his garden and turns it into beautiful objects. He is a passionate wood-lover, but with a greater purpose:
What we need in our lives is an inventory of factors that never change. I think that skill with one’s own hands—whether it’s tilling the soil or building a house, making a piece of furniture, playing a violin, or painting a painting—is something that doesn’t change with the vicissitudes of life. [Woodworking is] a kind of therapy, but it’s also a stabilizing force in my life—a total rest for my mind.
His workshop, housed in the garage at his home, which is not used for cars because ex-presidents are not required to drive themselves around, is furnished as a fully-equipped joiner’s workshop, thanks to a whip-round of White House staff when he was beaten by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 Presidential Election. Although he is perfectly at home with modern power tools, he confesses that his favourites are the draw-knife and spoke-shave (a sort of double-handled razor, or small plane). His furniture is highly regarded in the American woodworking community, and he recently auctioned a cabinet made of persimmon wood for his human-rights charity. It fetched a million dollars.
TREE TALE
The Beech
I harbour the animistic delusion that beech trees (Fagus sylvatica), with their muscular smooth grey trunks and soaring boughs, are the frozen statues of a long-lost race of giants. Not many trees take the breath away at first sight like a beech, but on a spring morning, very early, when the sun is struggling to light the forest floor through the canopy and one finds oneself coming upon an impossibly tall, soaring monster, it evokes a heroic age. When the first emerald leaves burst out in April there are few more thrilling sights in the countryside. Beech wood is a joy to work. With a smooth, dense, speckled grain, easily split, shaped and turned, it makes excellent tool handles, bowls, bodhran sticks and chair-legs; and it coppices marvellously well. It has almost never been used as a building timber, but is seen everywhere in the cabinet-maker’s pattern book as a wood of good, solid furniture. It burns hot on a fire and makes some of the finest charcoal.
BEECH
A noble giant of forest and hedgerow. The beech is not long-lived like the oak or the yew; but it is as much a part of our landscape and cultural heritage and one of the most beautiful of all broadleaved trees in all seasons.
With such pedigree, it is perhaps a little odd that beech trees do not figure more prominently in our folklore or in our landscape history. There are beeches in names, naturally: Buckinghamshire, for one, and that county’s famous Burnham Beeches (which are ancient pollards). There are record-breaking beeches, too: at Meikleour, in Perth and Kinross, they provide the tallest hedge in the world, planted in that fateful Jacobite year of 1745, lying along the edge of the A93 trunk road like an immense green wall a hundred feet high and more than five-hundred yards long. Medieval charters, and no doubt customary law long before that, are full of references to the nuts of the beech and oak: the right
of pannage entitled one to take cattle and pigs into the woods in autumn to fatten them. The leaves could also be used as fodder. And our word for book comes from the Anglo-Saxon boc, ‘beechwood’. Whether it refers to writing in runes on beechwood, or whether the wood was used for binding books, is not clear.
So why no folklore? In a sense, the answer is simple. Although beech trees can grow big—Britain’s champion, at Lydney Park in Gloucestershire, stands forty-three metres tall (more than a hundred-and-forty feet)—they are not long-lived compared to oak or yew. A hundred-and-fifty years is a good age for the beech, and so individual examples are rarely around long enough to enter into the national consciousness as purveyors of wisdom, fear, legend or quirk. As a tree of great woods and hedges, though, the beech excels. It is shade-tolerant, some might even say greedy; very few plants will live beneath it, though the bird’s-nest orchid is an exception, and so are fungi (the death cap among them). Oddly enough, for such a grand beast, the roots of the beech are shallow, so they are prone to being felled by a winter storm that would not affect an oak. But what their roots lack in strength they make up for in complexity. Beech trees rely on their below-ground partnership with mychorrizal fungi—one reason why the beech is such a gregarious tree, enjoying the company of its own kind.