by Max Adams
ALDER
The alder is a tree of damp places. It cannot claim any great beauty and is not considered an important timber tree; but its wood made the finest-grained charcoal for gunpowder, and so it was valued very highly in the days of Nelson and Wellington.
The sword in the stone
One of the most enduring Arthurian myths is that a righteous king will be able to draw a sword from a stone. Some years ago the archaeologist Francis Pryor pointed out that this must be some sort of folk memory of the Bronze Age, when weapons were made by casting bronze in stone moulds. So arcane and technical was the process that the smith was regarded as some sort of shamanic master of the dark arts; if you ever see a smith at work in his forge you can appreciate the mystery and apparently sinister power at work.
For perhaps fifteen-thousand years and more, humans have recognized that metals are different from all other substances. Gold, and iron from meteorites, were both found in pure form in nature and could be worked—gold more or less cold, iron when heated to a very high temperature. Among South American cultures gold was believed to be a gift direct from God, and as it happens many scientists believe that much of it comes from meteorites. Copper, which sometimes occurs in so-called ‘native’ form, was already being used in ancient Iraq around the ninth millennium BC. It is a most beautiful red or orange metal, relatively soft but capable of taking a polish. It can be beaten into sheets or moulded, but it does not hold a sharp edge to make it a useful material for tool-making; it is nothing like as sharp as a knapped flint.
The first metals to be extracted from mineral rock by heat were tin and lead, somewhere in Anatolia in the seventh century BC. These metals, of limited use when pure, could be extracted using the heat from a bonfire, so their discovery was probably accidental. Both are soft; neither can take an edge. It was only when copper and tin were alloyed to make bronze that the charcoal age, and humans’ ability to master their world, took off on a new evolutionary track around 3000 BC. The forging of bronze requires more heat than a bonfire can create; it needs a fire made with charcoal with air blown through it. The more oxygen that charcoal gets, the hotter it burns, and charcoal can get seriously hot: up to 2,700 degrees Celsius (copper begins to melt at 1,000 degrees, higher than the temperature of a very hot bonfire; tin at a mere 250 degrees). What is so special about bronze is that it is much tougher than either tin or copper on their own, will take a good edge, and can be worked to make tools and weapons as well as ornaments. The Bronze Age was an age of craftsmen, warriors and bling.
One problem for the aspiring bronze-smith, however, is that copper and tin are very rarely found together. There are proximate deposits in the Middle East; but the only other significant source in the Old World is Britain, and from the early second millennium bc onwards the peninsula of Cornwall and the mountains of Wales drew huge interest from geographers and traders across the ancient world. It was metal, underpinned by charcoal’s transformative power, that put Britain on the map; thousands of years later it was an industrial revolution based on charcoal’s replacement, coke, which turned the world map pink. Charcoal really came into its own with the smelting and forging of iron and the discovery of steel, which requires carbon from the charcoal to create a super-hard, high-tensile malleable and flexible metal. This was the Iron Age, which began in the first half of the second millennium BC. Tools and weapons made of iron or steel were a class above anything before, and they conferred a significant advantage on those who had the technology. And those who did not have it, wanted it: the Iron Age is an age of warfare. It is also one of wealth, agriculture and woodsmanship. Before the invention of coke, charcoal was the only fuel that could achieve the necessary temperatures—in excess of 1,400 degrees Celsius—to make the great weapons of war and peace: the axe, the sword and the plough. It is no wonder that smiths, keepers of the secrets of forging, were regarded by ancient kings as both a threat and a personal possession.
Seahenge
With edged bronze tools, forged in charcoal’s heat, humans were able to embark on the systematic felling and clearing of large tracts of landscape. The moors of Britain’s uplands, regarded as a natural and traditional landscape, were cleared of trees by Bronze Age farmers, whose cairns and dykes can still be clearly seen on Dartmoor, on the Yorkshire Wolds and Moors and in the Pennines and Cheviot Hills. With this new power over natural materials and over the land, ancient communities were also developing sophisticated social relationships with one another and with a spirit world populated by ancestors. In order to ensure the fertility of their crops (and men and women), their luck in battle and the sustaining cycle of the seasons, they opened up lines of communication to their ancestors who, they hoped, would intercede on their behalf with the forces of nature. Some part of their relationship with trees began to change, too: was it because they sensed a fracture with the forests which had sustained their forebears? Or had trees come to represent the souls, the accumulated wisdom of those ancestors?
In the spring of the year 2049 BC a community living on the coast of what is now Norfolk cut down twenty-five oak trees and built a circle with them. Each log was split in half, and each half was trimmed using a different axe (proved after a brilliant analysis by archaeologist Maisie Taylor), so we know that fifty or so people shared the task. There was a small entrance: in the middle a huge oak stump, more than a hundred-and-fifty years old, had been dragged using honeysuckle rope and trimmed using the biggest axe of all, turned upside down and rammed into the earth in a gesture perhaps of defiance or ritual execution. Many years later the circle was buried by sand blowing in from the coast. It was rediscovered in 1998 after waves began to erode the dunes beneath which it had been buried for four-thousand years.
What on earth was this community up to? Did they worship trees? Was this a special place where the head of the community consulted his or her friends, or did a medicine woman make secret potions and talk to the sky ancestors here? Maybe this was where dead people were laid out so that their spirits could float out to sea to become mermaids? Or was it just a children’s playground? It is impossible to be sure. But there is something a little sinister about the upturned trunk and roots; and, given what we know about the pre-Christian use of great sacred trees as royal inauguration sites, about their value as tribal talismans or totems, we might speculate that an upturned trunk was a sign of triumph over an enemy. Who that enemy was, we will never know. Perhaps it was the sea itself.
One thing we can be sure of is exactly how old it is. And that’s because of tree rings. The rings visible in a tree trunk when you slice through it record the growth of the tree every year. In a warm, wet year the ring will be wide because the tree grew faster. In a cold, dry year it will be narrower. Year after year, these rings record changes in the weather and, because the climate is always changing, the pattern of rings makes a unique fingerprint of the years when that tree was alive. Dendrochronologists, the scientists who study tree rings, have linked these records from one dead tree to another, overlapping backwards for thousands of years so that we can tell when almost any ancient log was cut down.
Riddley Walker
One of my literary heroes is a young man by the name of Riddley Walker. In Russell Hoban’s eccentric cult novel of the same name, the county of Kent is the post-apocalyptic setting for a sort of future Iron Age, in which the visionary but naive Riddley sets out to understand the history of the ‘Littl Shyning Man’—that is, the atom bomb which has destroyed civilization some time in the past. His only means of reconstructing that past are a fragmented oral history preserved in sinister Punch and Judy puppet shows and the archaeology of the landscape he lives in. The language he speaks is a richly poetic but debased form of English. He scrapes a living working for gangs that excavate scrap iron from ancient rubbish heaps. His initially unwitting purpose is to stifle knowledge of how to make gunpowder before it threatens to begin the cycle of destruction again.
Gunpowder is a mixture of seventy-five per cent potassium nit
rate, fifteen per cent carbon in the form of charcoal, and ten per cent sulphur. The nitrate or saltpetre, which acts as an oxidizer, can be refined and produced in a variety of back-garden ways. In Riddley Walker it is the importation of the magical yellow element sulphur, probably from the island of Sicily where it occurs naturally, that must be stopped. Gunpowder was certainly invented in China, perhaps as far back as the tenth century AD. It reached Europe around the thirteenth century and became the ultimate destructive weapon of war through generations of dynastic conflicts right into the nineteenth century, before guncotton and nitro-glycerine superseded it for really big bangs. The best charcoal for gunpowder manufacture is alder wood, which produces a fine, even grain. Riddley is right to be suspicious of the secretive colliers practising the dark arts in what he calls, with poetic irony, the ‘hart of the wud’.
Colemen and Colliers
Before mineral coal replaced it, charcoal was known simply as ‘coal’ and mineral coal was called ‘seacoal’, because it was traditionally gleaned from the foreshore. Charcoal burners were called ‘colliers’ or ‘colemen’, and so those surnames are relics of the charcoal age. Since it makes no sense to transport heavy wood, charcoal was made where trees grew, especially where there was ironstone.
The great forests of Dean and the Weald survived not in spite of the charcoal industry but because of it. Woods were not felled to feed kilns; underwood from coppicing, or as a by-product of managed timber woodlands, was sufficient in the medieval period to support nine-hundred colliers in the Forest of Dean alone. Because their work was conducted in the woods, colliers were itinerant; they travelled with their families into the woods in spring, set up camp, and stayed there until the burning season ended. Very little evidence of these camps can be found on the ground: the accommodation was a primitive tent-like affair of branches covered with turf. However, photographs of such dwellings exist, which testify to an extraordinarily primitive lifestyle surviving into the late nineteenth century. The general populace had a deep mistrust of such folk, rather as they do of travelling communities today, added to by the arcane nature of the work and an atavistic fear of the dismal canopy of dense woodland. Towns and cities passed by-laws attempting to control the proximity of kilns because of their polluting smoke, and colliers were prevented from entering the City of London as early as the thirteenth century.
Iron smelting and forging, as production increased in the medieval period, already put Britain’s charcoal production under pressure. The rise in demand for charcoal in making gunpowder not only increased the stress that woodlands faced but also raised prices. By the seventeenth century, the active search for an alternative was under way. Experiments were made with coal to see if it could be used as a smelting fuel; but coal is very dirty stuff, full of sulphur and other impurities, and it doesn’t burn as hot as charcoal. So various clever men tried to distil coal, as wood is distilled to make charcoal. It turns out not to be that easy.
An Elizabethan brewer called Hugh Plat (1552–1608) needed a cheaper source of fuel to malt his barley; he tried coal and produced a beer that tasted... well… not very nice. So he experimented with coke, a distilled version of coal that burned much cleaner and hotter than coal. He failed to perfect it, though, and the beer didn’t taste much better. Another enterprising industrialist, Dud Dudley (1600–84), took the process further in the next few decades, producing substantial quantities of coke for his iron-making business. He suffered various improbable reversals in his business life—and in life in general: among other exploits, he fought for the Royalists in the English Civil War and was lucky not to be hanged. But he did write a treatise on his process, the 1655 Metallum Martis. It was not until Abraham Darby I (1678–1717) improved the technique in the first decade of the eighteenth century that the Industrial Revolution really took off. The end of the age of wood was in sight.
TREE TALE
The Holly
The holly (Ilex aquifolium) is one of those natural marvels, so easily taken for granted that only its absence would shock us into appreciating it. Its beauty is year-round, and the thrilling sight of a female tree festooned with red berries against that dark green foliage in late autumn or under snow is unforgettable. (Hollies are ‘dioeceous’—they only very rarely produce male and female flowers on the same tree.) The superstitious belief that a harsh winter can be predicted by an unusually heavy crop of berries seems silly; much more likely it reflects a warm, wet summer, with perfect conditions for producing berries and an abundance of alternative foods for autumn birds.
Holly is an example of an evergreen broadleaf, its prickles effective at warding off the sensitive noses of grazing livestock—though in the past the leaves were also used as cattle fodder during harsh winters. Hollies grow across Europe and into Asia Minor, but ideally they prefer maritime climates with few temperature extremes and a low chance of drought, even though their shiny, waxy leaves are excellent at retaining moisture.
Like the yew, the holly tree has traditionally been associated with Christmas, with everlasting life and with sacrifice. Indeed, such is the value of the berry-laden bough at Christmas that the locations of commercial holly plantations are a closely guarded secret, often screened from prying eyes by taller conifers. Those berries are, however, poisonous—though not quite so poisonous as the seeds of the yew.
‘Hollin’, an element in some place-names, can reflect an area where the trees were once abundant, perhaps somewhere where a holly reproduced by layering. Layering trees, especially those with low, sweeping branches, produce new plants when a branch becomes buried under soil or leaf litter, when it can spontaneously send up new shoots that then become independent trees (hazels can be deliberately propagated this way, as can many garden plants). Hollies are slow-growing but can form quite large trees. In Britain the champions are an ancient specimen at Knightshayes, Devon, not quite forty feet tall but an impressive six-and-a-half feet around its girth; a holly at Brampton Bryan Park in Herefordshire, which measures around seventy feet tall; and one at Staverton Thicks, in Suffolk—a specimen of about the same height. The wood of the holly is very white and fine-grained, almost translucent when freshly cut and before it browns slightly, perfect for use in turning fine objects. Traditionally, wooden chess sets were made from holly when box-wood was scarce, the black pieces being stained with boot polish. I sometimes turn handles for small tools out of holly. It has a lovely smooth feel under the chisel.
What wisdom does the holly have to offer us? Perhaps none. Perhaps its beauty simply speaks for itself.
HOLLY
An evergreen broadleaf, the beautiful holly is unmistakeable for its dark green, shiny, prickly leaves and bright red berries. The wood is white, very fine-grained and lovely to turn on a lathe.
10
Architects
Size matters—The first house—Houses for the dead—Firewood—At home with Saint Columba—
TREE TALE: THE OAK
Wood. It shrinks. It expands. It twists. It bows. Its strength is unpredictable. Insects eat it. It rots. It burns. If an inventor were to present this product to a panel of building inspectors today, they’d ban it on the spot.
Attributed to JOSEPH LSTIBUREK
Size matters
THE WORLD’S TALLEST, perhaps most massive and arguably most beautiful completely wooden building is the Church of the Transfiguration at Kizhi Pogost in Lake Onega, Russia. Built in the years after 1714, with twenty-two onion-domes and a height of more than a hundred feet, it was constructed from Scots pine logs and without using a single nail. It looks almost like a toy or a model kit, a capricious showpiece of the carpenter’s craft with a nod, no doubt, to the profession of the Messiah.
Other contenders for the ranks of the world’s greatest wooden architecture include the roof of Westminster Hall in London; the Todai-Ji Buddhist temple at Nara, Japan, which until the late twentieth century was the largest wooden structure in the world by area; and Number 3 slip at Chatham Dockyard in Kent, once the largest
wooden structure in Europe. Today, that claim belongs to the Metropol Parasol in Seville, Spain—but it is not made entirely of wood. In Stockholm, Sweden, there is a plan to build a wooden skyscraper thirty-four storeys tall, while in Holland they are building beautiful, elegant and thoroughly modern wooden bridges using hi-tech methods to bond and shape laminated beams and trusses.
Wood is a material that can be endlessly re-imagined; and we are unlikely ever to run out of it unless we do something very stupid—I mean even more stupid—to our planet. And, despite what people might think, wood is more fire-resistant than either steel or concrete. Wood of a sufficient bore, especially round logs, will char externally in a serious fire, but takes longer to fail structurally than its modern counterparts. The word on the wire is that a relatively recent type of friction-welding technique, in which wood laminates are chemically fused by heat and friction, may be about to liberate wood as an engineering material three-hundred years after its apparent demise.
The first house
In the last ten years or so, three dramatic new candidates for the title of Britain’s oldest dwelling have come to light. A rather old-fashioned, southern view of the past would have us believe that all new ideas arriving in Britain landed on the south coast, or perhaps in the Thames Valley, and gradually, very gradually, moved northwards where, as we know, it’s always cold and wet. In the Mesolithic period, when Britain was inhabited by semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer bands from across the dry, post-glacial plain that we now call the English Channel, our ancestors didn’t know that.