Wildwood

by Roger Deakin

  There was great satisfaction in topping off the new-laid hedge with the woven binders: long, slender eight- or ten-foot wands of hazel plaited decoratively but also entirely functional. They hold down the springy pleachers and draw an elegant line along the hedge, protecting it from cattle, which will tend to lean into it or massage their necks against it. Last of all, I went along cutting off the tops of the stakes to an even height just proud of the binders. Professionals take a lot of pride in the resulting white-sliced dotted line.

  Hedgers usually make bonfires of the brushwood, but I often deny myself that pleasure and try to follow an older custom of wasting nothing, so pile it on to the trailer, throw a rope over it and add it to the dead hedge I’ve built beside an old pollard crack willow at the edge of the common. The hedge affords protection to the house and garden from the fierce westerlies that blow across the great inland sea of common, beating the grasses into waves of silver light. The same winds dry out the stacked brushwood, which settles imperceptibly – as a pheasant or a leveret, when surprised, settles itself stealthily into the ground. Once the brushwood has dried and compacted itself, I slice it up like a loaf into kindling and begin all over again. Brushwood faggots from the hedge were much used in bread ovens.

  In his Natural History of Selborne, Gilbert White gives a revealing account of the value that was placed on the smaller denominations of wood, the ‘lop and top’, brushwood or spray that is now regularly fed into a wood-chipper or burnt on a bonfire:

  A very large fall of timber, consisting of about one thousand oaks, has been cut this spring (viz. 1784), in the Holt forest; one-fifth of which, it is said, belongs to the grantee, Lord Stawel. He lays claim also to the lop and top; but the poor of the parishes of Binsted and Frinsham, Bentley and Kingsley, assert that it belongs to them; and, assembling in a riotous manner, have actually taken it all away.

  The earliest hedges may have been palisades of thorn shoved in between two rows of stakes to pen stock, or perhaps to create a defence. Sheltered from browsing herbivores by the dead hedge, it would not have been long before a living hedge of saplings sprang up from seed and superseded it. The dry moats of hill forts like Maiden Castle in Dorset would probably also have bristled with coppiced blackthorn. In Rogue Male, set in Dorset near by, Geoffrey Household describes the remote hollow lane where his hero goes to ground as protected by ‘sentinel thorns’. He too uses the dead thorns defensively: ‘Then I unpacked the billhook and slashed at the dead wood on the inside of the hedges. I jammed the bicycle cross-wise between the banks and piled over it a hedge of thorn that would have stopped a lion.’

  Down in the wood, I used a long-handled hook to cut back some of the blackthorn army that was slowly suckering its way out of one of the other perimeter hedges. I spared most of it, because blackthorn makes a magnificent show of snowy blossom when the cold north-east winds blow in late March, known as the ‘blackthorn winter’. It also provides an intoxicating harvest of sloes for sloe gin at Christmas. They are always best fully ripened after the first frost, then posted one by one down the gullet of a bottle of cheap supermarket gin with added sugar, as geese are forcefed for pâté in the Dordogne. Blackthorn makes beautiful, plum-dark walking sticks and gives deep cover to birds. In my wood, nothing grows beneath it except lords and ladies, dog’s mercury and the occasional primrose or celandine at the margins of its impenetrable, spiny thicket. The rabbits love its bare earth floor and have excavated a busy warren in the safety of its forbidding tangle. Linnaeus dubbed blackthorn Prunus spinosa because everything about it is prickly, tart, sour and generally stroppy. He might have called it noli tangere – don’t touch. But its old Latin name is bellicum. Its hard, dense wood is said to fashion the original cosh: the knobkerrie, or shillelagh, although Robert Graves asserts in The White Goddess that the weapon is in fact an oak club. However, he goes on to say that blackthorn is the traditional timber with which Irish tinkers fight at fairs, and its Gaelic name, straif, may be the origin, via Breton and the Northern French estrif, of ‘strife’. The blackthorn staff, says Graves, was the witches’ instrument of sorcery. I prefer to think of the sloe eyes of romantic heroines, or of Dylan Thomas’s ‘sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea’.

  I have learnt to treat blackthorn with respect. Now and again it pierces my leather hedging gloves like a snake bite. It is the viper of trees. The spines are syringes loaded with some obscure poison that causes the deep puncture wound to bruise and throb painfully for days. Hedging can be far more dangerous than it seems. It often puts me in mind of my late friend Billy Bartrum, a farm labourer who was blinded in one eye by blackthorn as a young man while hedging. As savages in our first woods at Headstone Lane, we would eat a single mouth-puckering sloe for a dare or an initiation. Andy Goldsworthy collects the thorns of hawthorn or blackthorn to sew his leafy constructions together. I still have one of his exquisite leaf boxes of sycamore, pinned with thorns, on a shelf. It soon faded from green to brown and is now sixteen years old, still perfectly intact.

  Many of our modern would-be managers of nature are under the delusion that blackthorn is some kind of weed, just because it spreads, like elm, by suckering roots. Nothing could be less true. Cobbett extols its virtues as the very fiercest of hedges: one of the few that stock will not simply eat their way through. In the wood, I use the blackthorn brushwood to protect the stools of the hazel I have just coppiced. The porcupine mounds allow the new shoots to come up unmolested by deer or rabbits. It is a species of barbed wire and, you might imagine, far too dangerous ever to have made faggots. In fact, it makes a superb fuel, burning with such instant, vicious incandescence that it was ideal for the microwave of the old cottagers: the brick or cob bread oven. On a bonfire it displays the same explosive power, towering into flame and heaving thunderous sighs from inside a white-hot core. Even when green, it can be persuaded to burn. In January I had found myself lying full length on the frosty tussocks of a glade blowing like a dragon into the orange wigwam of flame at the core of a tangled blackthorn bonfire. I was clearing some of the front rank of spear-bearers marching out into the wood from the hedge. The technique is to crawl in at rabbit-level among the molehills with a triangular bow saw and cut through the tough little trunks an inch up. The inside of a blackthorn thicket is the best place to be if you want to understand the value of such places, fashionably dismissed as ‘scrub’, as cover for wild mammals, insects and birds.

  I had broken the ash handle of one of my billhooks during the day through some mild abuse: using its flat side to beat in some of the hazel stakes. Already weakened by woodworm, it snapped. That night I thrust the blade into the fire to burn out the embedded remains of the old handle, resolving to make a new one in the morning. The split ash logs I was burning were clean, white and straight-grained, so I took one outside next day and took my axe to it, splitting off a triangular piece roughly the right size for a handle. Then I rough-carved it with a pocket knife, turned one end on the lathe, and fitted and pinned it into the steel socket in the blade. Locking the blade in the vice, I grasped the handle, sculpting and smoothing it to the shape of my grip. These hedging tools are both swords and ploughshares. They are not so far removed from the halberds and pikes of the old battlefields, and it is easy to see how readily a peasant army could have been raised and armed.

  Although I have only four meadows and a small wood, there is nearly a mile of hedgerow on my land. There was still a maze of mostly small fields and hedges when I came to the village in 1970. There were four miles of them within a half-mile of my doorstep. Now almost all are gone, except for my own eccentric oasis, the nearby woods and our green lanes. Before 1960 few of the parish hedges shown on the 1936 Ordnance Survey had been uprooted, and I calculate from the maps that there were some thirty-seven miles of them. Today no more than eight miles of them survive, of which three run round the perimeter of the common. Another three miles line the lanes and a few of the byroads. On the farmland itself, just one and a half miles of
hedges survive. People talk about managing hedges, as if you had to be constantly working at them like the Forth Bridge. If you want them to be stock-proof, laying them every twenty years and cutting them each year is the best way, but if containing animals is no longer the main object, or there’s a fence to do it, neglect can often be the most enlightened policy. Most of my hedges are jungles of the various trees, draped with blackberry, dog-rose, bryony, honeysuckle and wild hop, all scrambling about the branches. Birds are highly attracted to this sort of cover, so the hedges are full of nests and birdsong.

  Each hedge has a distinct character. One was dominated by elm until the disease killed the trees one by one. They stood like masts for years, as sails of ivy hoisted themselves in their rigging, then caught the full force of whichever November gale came along next and crashed. Hawthorn, dogwood, sloe, maple, crab apple, rose and bramble leapt in and filled the gaps, but now the elm is tentatively reasserting itself, growing from its original roots and overtopping the brambles, which may well be acting as a shield against the beetles that carry the spores of the Dutch elm disease fungus. The beetles mostly fly below twelve feet, and if all they encounter is a wall of bramble, they will just go elsewhere. Most of the other hedges are a mix of hazel, maple and ash, with here and there a holly, crab apple, bullace or an oak, and an under-blush of dogwood, the hips of wild roses or the exquisite little pink berries of the spindle tree.

  Laid hedges are certainly more stock-proof, and their trees grow into interesting, contorted shapes. Very old laid hedges can be works of the hedgers’ art: a kind of tree jazz, improvised down the generations. A laid hedge is also sturdier and more stable. But the modern farmer’s or conservationist’s natural impulse towards tidiness and management is mostly one to resist when it comes to hedges. Unless you can lay them by hand, far better to leave them alone to be as wild as they like and grow into their own shapes. I know of nothing uglier or more saddening than a machine-flailed hedge. It speaks of the disdain of nature and craft that still dominates our agriculture. Even after years of benign neglect, plashed hedges stand as monuments to the best traditions of good husbandry.

  Coppicing

  Keith Dunthorne, my thatcher friend from our next-door village, had invited me over for a day’s coppicing with him in his hazel wood near Bungay. Every thatched roof requires quantities of coppiced hazel spars to secure it like hairpins. So each winter Keith harvests the fast-grown pliable stems he will need for the coming season’s work. I rise early and roust about in my workshop for the right billhook, then start up the humming grinder to hone the blade. Sparks strike the cold early-morning air, and I temper the hot edge in rainwater with a fizz. I throw a triangular bow saw into the back of the car, thick leather gloves, goggles and a hard hat with a visor.

  When I arrive in Keith’s yard he too is loading tools into the open back of his truck, and I help break open some hay for the horses. Next to the bales in the open-fronted barn sheafs of reed are stacked fifteen feet high, end out. This is Norfolk reed from the Broads, the real thing. For Keith, it is a matter of principle to insist on using it instead of the cheaper imported material from Romania or Hungary. It means his price for a roof will be a little higher, but it helps keep the few remaining reed-cutters on the Broads in work.

  Keith is agile, slender and wiry, with the weathered good looks and steady eye of a man who is confident in his skills. In his battered trilby and lace-up boots, he has the romantic air of a Romany. He puts fuel cans and his Stihl chainsaw in the back with his favourite hook, very sharp and thin bladed. Between us on the bench seat of the Toyota Hiace sits his lurcher, Zeka. She is docile and affectionate, with a dark-grey curly coat. We follow the Waveney along its water-meadows, and the dog never stops scanning them for anything that moves. Near Bungay we turn off into the winding lanes of an estate, pass the hall and slip into the old wood, pulling in the truck down a brambled, grassy concrete road the Americans constructed during the war. It was their policy to store the bombs and armaments hidden inside woods in camouflaged concrete bunkers well away from the vulnerable airfields that chequered Suffolk and Norfolk. Woods were, as ever, places of concealment.

  Keith and I sit in the cab steaming the windscreen with tea from our flasks. Vapour rises off dewy trees into the sunny February day as we leave Zeka asleep in the van and set off into the line of hazel coppice in helmets and visors. Keith wears no gloves: his hands are leather. He has been coppicing the wood for twenty-five years now, working from its south flank, cutting successive swathes of ash and hazel about ten yards wide from east to west of the wood. The result is that each new band of coppice regrowth is stepped back, zoned by height towards the south to allow in the maximum of sunlight to stimulate new growth. Some coppicers pile the leavings of brushwood over the newly cut coppice stools to protect new shoots from browsing deer or rabbits. The shoots will always find their way to the light through the mounded twigs. Keith doesn’t bother and finds the trees regenerate perfectly well. The wood seems to have escaped damage from deer. This may be because it is relatively small, and there is evidence that deer prefer to browse in bigger woods, where they may feel safer and there is more to eat.

  Keith cuts down the twelve- or sixteen-foot hazels with his chainsaw almost level with the ground. He finds it makes no difference whether the stools are cut horizontally or at an angle, as recommended by the traditionalists to allow rainwater to run off. I follow with the billhook, stripping off the side shoots and stacking the resulting poles in loose bundles on the wood floor. As we move through the wood, I make neat piles of the brushwood. In medieval days, and probably until well into the last century, none of this would have been wasted. It would have been bundled tightly into faggots and stored in the barn to dry thoroughly. Faggots were burnt in the bread oven, heating it with a short, fierce blaze.

  We drag the poles through the wood to the truck and load them in the open truck so they overhang at the back. It is gruelling work, all the more so because of the awkward, unnatural twisting effort of hugging the rods together at the same time as hauling them through snagging brambles.

  Apart from the chainsaw, we are following a very old tradition in this wood. The billhooks we are using would have looked much the same two hundred years ago, although they varied in design, as they still do, in each part of the country. The art of coppicing goes back at least 6,000 years in Britain to the Sweet Track in the Somerset Levels, a Neolithic wooden walking track over a mile long running across wet or flooded peat to link what was then the island of Westhay to Shapwick Burtle, a ridge of higher ground. Poles of ash, oak and lime were cut down, transported to the Levels and pegged together in a sophisticated piece of early engineering in the winter or early spring of 3807 or 3806 BC. A series of trestles, driven into the wet peat, supported an oak walkway of split trunks. A whole web of wooden tracks has been discovered in the Levels. Another, the Eclipse Track, was built differently out of a series of woven coppice hurdles in 1800 BC, and the Walton Track, also on the Levels, was composed almost entirely of hazel rods. Close examination of the widths of the tree rings in the wood of these tracks makes such historical accuracy possible. The ring patterns are compared with those in other wood samples of known date. Early coppice, cut with a stone axe, is recognizable by the heel of torn cambium and bark at the base of each rod left where it was wrenched and twisted off the stool. The ancient Somerset tracks have all been preserved in the airless conditions of wet peat.

  There is evidence that early coppice was grown for fodder, and that the tops of the stems were cut off for their foliage. Pollard ash is still harvested for fodder today in parts of Sweden and elsewhere in Europe. The coppiced rods would have provided a second harvest. Quite how trees evolved their ability to sprout new stems when coppiced is something of a mystery. They often coppice themselves naturally: hazel will grow new shoots when old stems die, and I have seen trees broken off at the base by an avalanche sending up new coppice stems. One intriguing possibility, recently suggested by
Oliver Rackham in Ancient Woodland, is that the first large-scale coppicers were the giant elephants of the Pleistocene Era, like the one found at West Runton near Cromer, an animal the size of a London bus whose devastating browsing would have exerted a powerful evolutionary argument for spontaneous regrowth.

  By the time of the Sweet Track, people had discovered that trees are far more productive if they are coppiced on a regular cycle. Since the earliest account of a medieval wood in 1269–70 at Beaulieu Abbey in the New Forest, coppice cycles have varied from as little as four years to twenty-eight, depending on the species and the use of the wood. But prehistoric people also knew how much more useful, versatile and manageable the regrowth shoots from a stump were than single trees. Interpreting the historical records, Oliver Rackham has pointed out that woods often represented a form of savings account, to be coppiced and sold as a crop of under-wood on a rainy day. Some woods were coppiced all at once every so often, others by harvesting a succession of glades on an annual rotation, as we were doing.

  Keith’s agreement with the estate doesn’t allow him in to coppice the wood until after the pheasant-shooting season. Now he is anxious to cut the hazel as soon as he can before the sap begins to rise and spoil the wood for thatching brorch, or spars. The presence of sap will attract woodworm, which love its sweetness, so you must cut your hazel while the sap is sunk for the winter.