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Coppicing has been carried out in Britain for
thousands of years with the earliest evidence coming
from the construction of Neolithic wooden
trackways using small trees and coppice poles.
One such trackway was built across the peat of the
Somerset Levels and now an even older example has
been found - a timber pathway across the Thames
marshes near Belmarsh Prison in Plumstead. Five
hundred years older than Stonehenge the path was
discovered during works on the Crossrail project in
the last couple of years.
The word
coppice
comes from the French ‘couper’,
meaning to cut. In a coppiced wood, tree stems are
cut down almost to ground level so that over the
subsequent years, many new poles or shoots will
grow. Ten or more years later, according to the type
of tree and the thickness of poles required the
coppiced tree, or
stool
, is ready to be harvested,
and the cycle can begin again. Coppiced trees can
live to a great age - some our oldest trees are coppice
stools and they maybe more than 1,000 years old.
Traditionally a wood under this type of management
contains coppiced trees (underwood) and scattered
timber trees (standards). Poles are cut from the
underwood, and timber is obtained from the standard
trees. The finer, younger cuttings of trees like the
birch were used as firewood, sold in bundles known
as faggots. Hazel was especially valuable for wattle
and daub and for thatching spars, willow, of course,
for basketry. Hornbeam known as ironwood for its
hardness, was especially good for tool handles and
for that staple of country life and the stuff of many
a legend - besom brooms, the handle could be made
of hazel or ash and the head from birch twigs.
Our finest surviving example of an ancient worked
coppice is The Bradfield Woods in Suffolk with an
unbroken history of coppicing going back until
1252 when it was owned by the Abbey at Bury
St Edmunds. Typical of coppice the whole of
Bradfield Woods is surrounded by a vast bank and
ditch to keep livestock out.
In wood for pasture the trees were protected from
grazing livestock, or indeed from game animals, by
lopping off all the branches to a height of six to ten feet
above the ground. This is pollarding and it promotes a
dense new growth of branches out of reach of grazing
animals. Every seven to fifteen years, in the autumn,
the new shoots on the pollarded
boll
could be cut for
fuel, fencing and poles. The leaves of the trees could
also be gathered each summer as leaf fodder for
domestic animals. Like coppiced trees, pollarded trees
live much longer than
“maiden trees”
and many old
parklands, which were once wood pasture, are still
characterised by veteran pollards hundreds of years old.
The New Forest and Windsor Forest are good examples
of ancient wood pasture with ancient pollard trees and
it was such a tree, the Queen Beech at Frithsden, near
Berkhamsted in the Chilterns that was used as the
model for Harry Potter’s Whomping Willow.