Woodlot

“…you won’t get much use from it.”

by Stuart Harrison, Devon, UK

When we were looking to buy our small farm, the real estate agent took me on a tour of the pastures and fields. He made a great play of the fact that our land was free draining, and how the rock beneath was “shillet,” a type of shale in the South West of England that farmers he insisted valued for it’s grass growing potential, mineral availability and lack of standing water in wintertime.

As we passed what I eventually named as the “Marsh Field,” the one field on the farm which is not on shillet but on a heavy clay, I asked the realtor if a small section of steep woodland off to the north belonged to the farm. “Oh yes, that’s yours as well, but it’s overgrown, too steep for tractors, and you won’t get much use from it,” he said. Returning to his theme about the wondrous value of the rock beneath most of the farm, he strode on so we could examine the farm house before daylight failed. The house was a wreck, rotten windows, leaking roof, collapsed ceilings, peeling paint and no running water save an old lead stand pump in the kitchen, a kitchen which had a beaten earth floor and looked like it was decorated a century earlier, like much of the rest of the house.

Steph and I had travelled many miles, looked at many properties, and were fast coming to the conclusion that our budget put most farm properties in the U.K. well beyond our reach. But something about this one rang a chord deep inside us both. It had pretty much all we were looking for, great pasture, a river (The Crooked Oak) running through the valley, a small orchard, useful out buildings and a cow shed (albeit in various stages of collapse) and a wood lot. I really didn’t give that much thought to the wood lot when we put in our sealed bid, but to cut a long story short, we got our farm, and the wood lot has proved the realtor wrong time and time again and is a vital part in helping us to prosper.

As many of you will be aware from personal experience, the problem with taking over a property like the one we purchased is that the task ahead of you can be so daunting that you just wonder where to start? For what seemed like weeks, and probably was months, we just wandered about the place thinking “that needs doing, that needs putting right, that’s a problem, we need to do this, fix that, repair the other.” Inertia, I learnt in farming, is your biggest enemy; so overwhelmed was I that I decided to start by just doing at one job a day, and let providence take care of the rest.

We took possession one January, and it was cold. So we needed to burn stuff to keep warm as we only had one functioning fireplace and we were always weary after long days outside. After clearing out the woodshed of a few sorry sticks, I took the chainsaw and marched up the hill to our few acres of wood. Here at least was something I could make a start on, at least we might be warm while we made a plan, and someone told me you can burn European Ash even when it’s green. That wasn’t entirely true, wood is always best left to season, we season ours for at least one year, but longer often seems better depending on the species. However our green ash did burn and it kept us warm for that first winter. As soon as I got there, up on the hill, and made my way into the quiet dark depths of the wood lot I could tell this would be somewhere I would come to love. A couple of hinds scampered off through the gaps in the trees, birds took flight and although a heavy rain was falling outside of the wood, here as I watched the deer running down to the river, it seemed not to penetrate the canopy too much. Cocooned within, I set about cutting timber, by chance found some standing dead wood, and despite my knowing that it was a haven for all sorts of over-wintering bugs, I thought providence might forgive me my urgent need as I cut it for firewood.

Since this first encounter, the wood lot is probably my favorite of all places on the farm. It’s only a small section, just about three acres, but it packs a lot in to that space. For a start it is filled with the most wonderful wildlife. Foxes, Badgers, both hedgerow and ground nesting birds, owls, horseshoe bats, roe deer and on occasions when the weather up on Exmoor is really bad, red deer. One freezing January morning I took the dogs for a walk at dawn to marvel at the crystal magnificence of the be-frosted Marsh Field, returning for breakfast past the woodland. The dogs froze staring into the wood and standing not 50 feet from me was the most wonderful Red Deer stag with some thirty of his harem stood behind him. So perfectly camouflaged amongst the trees were the deer, that without the dogs and him raising his head and antlers to look at me I might have walked past him without noticing.

Since working it with my horses I have noticed a huge diversity of plant life, growing increasingly diverse as the years progress, wild primroses, bluebells, lesser celandine, wood anemone and other British woodland species. I’m convinced the movement of the horses working within the woods are the key to this burgeoning and ever-growing diversity.

Within the woods I regularly encounter my two favorite birds, the wren and the gold crest. Both love a hedgerow home, and it is always a joy to see them flitting hither and thither. At the northern edge of our wood lot, in a deep cutting, is a main highway and I am building a traditional hedgerow at the crest of the cutting. I’m not sure why, perhaps in some mistaken hope of limiting the hum of the traffic, or maybe because I feel the pull of some deep territorial imperative in not having a barrier betwixt my farm and the seething stream of modernity that the flow of traffic represents. For whatever reason it has become something of a passion, but I justify it to myself, and the time it has taken to build, as a home for these two special bird species.

When I began the hedgerow project I knew almost nothing about why in our part of England, fencing is unusual and hedgerows ubiquitous. My up-country friends would claim it is because we Devon folk are peasants, poor, and have nothing better to do with our time but hew and dig. I like to think it’s a combination of tradition and frugality. I did ask a recently retired friend who has done a degree in archeology why and how hedgerows were built, and he had to admit that after doing some research himself, nobody really knows, although their are some theories. So by way of an experiment I decided to see how I would do it and began by “dead hedging” as the Romans did to keep their livestock contained. It’s a simple process, once trees are felled for firewood I use the tops and smaller branches (hereabouts we call it “brash”) piled up and interwoven to create a barrier. Next I dig a shallow ditch on the windward side of the hedge and throw the earth up against the lower parts of the cut and layered brash, I might add some animal dung if I have a surfeit and this covers the lower layer of branches of the dead hedge. If I have any small saplings available I will pull them up nearby and plant them within the earth dug from the ditch sheltered by the brash. This is a yearly process and over the years if you continue to do this a number of things happen. First the older dead hedging begins to decay and enriches the earth beneath. Then the newer branches prevent larger herbivores from eating any young shoots, which prosper in the shelter of the barrier. As the years go by, brambles, which I think of as natures barbed wire, might entwine around the branches, saplings will grow up through the hedge, a yearly clearing of the ditch provides more earth, more decay, more growth. Within five to seven years you have a stock-proof barrier. Quite how stock-proof probably depends on the stock, but it’s certainly sheep-proof and horse-proof after that time, and even my rabbit hound “Harold” is put off from penetrating it’s tangled mass. Perhaps this is the origin of the hedgerow? To keep it sound and stock-proof I undertake a three to five yearly “laying” (cutting upright stems thicker than your thumb 80% of the way through and then folding them back horizontally against the line of the hedge) adds density and strength.

We cut from four to five cords of firewood every year from late November to the middle of February. This fuels our open log fire that we have burning during the evening hours from late September through to May. It heats the far end of our Devon longhouse built in 1802. I fell the standing timber with a modern chainsaw but in a traditional style, leaving a “coppiced stool” or by “pollarding.”

Coppicing is an ancient system of woodland management. Trees are cut close to the ground on a regular cycle. They regrow from dormant buds at the base of the stump (known as the stool) to create dense stands of multi-stemmed trees. The new stems grow back faster because of the huge root system of the original coppiced tree and provide a sustainable timber supply that allows regular harvesting rather than cutting older mature trees down. The best time to coppice in the northern hemisphere is late September to early March when trees are dormant. Frequency depends on species and the products you want to create, seven to ten years for hazel rods, fifteen years for sweet chestnut fencing posts, and fifteen to twenty five years for oak and hornbeam building lumber and firewood. I have often sat when resting the horses from work and rather macabrely pondered how many more cycles of coppicing for each type of tree the good Lord will grant me!

Pollarding is the regular cutting of upper branches of a tree to encourage regrowth of dense foliage at the top of a truncated trunk. The cut branches can be used for firewood, building materials and other coppice products. Opening up the canopy in this way increases woodland light levels and benefits ground flora while making it more productive for grazing. It was also traditionally used in the Middle Ages to define land boundaries and prevents livestock from killing the tree by continuous nibbling on fresh shoots, which are now put out of reach. In pollarding a tree you first cut it in winter. Do this once the tree has grown above the height at which you want to maintain the pollard. It’s best to do this when the tree is young, usually 5-15 years old. Larger trees can also be topped and established as pollards – success depends on the age, species and level of shading. Re-pollarding can be done in winter for firewood and building materials.

While the realtor was correct in saying the ground is too steep and unsuitable for tractors, not having any meant that my horses could add another skill to their repertoire and all have proved their worth in the wood lot. Steep ground and densely grown trees are not without their challenges to horses, but all of my three Suffolks now work well in the wood lot, especially since I have thinned it out, and all seem to enjoy their one to one time with me working on firewood and building material production. They are absolutely essential team members and we would endure very cold winter evenings and a denuded bank balance without their noble efforts.

We have benefited in so many ways from that small section of ground the realtor felt that “…you won’t get much use from it.” More than once when stacking firewood, building a bridge across the crooked oak, manufacturing crude building lumber, sitting by a roaring fire or glorying in the nature found in our wood lot I have smiled to myself and muttered under my breath “…you won’t get much use from it.”