The latest update from Michael Walter:
Some people claim that winter is their favourite season, but it beats me how anyone can enjoy days with a bare seven hours of often leaden light, when the wind is icy but wet, and the countryside is devoid of colour and life. To my mind one of the few redeeming features of this time of year is that it becomes easier to understand the wood - summer’s barrier of foliage has been blown away, stripping the trees to their bare bones. Humps and depressions in the ground stand out far more clearly, perhaps marking where a medieval gang dug out a boundary ditch and bank or created a saw pit over which oak trunks could be laboriously cut into planks. Occasional oak trees are now clearly visible in an otherwise rather boring stretch of dense coppice woodland, testament to the ancient practice of managing the wood as coppice-with-standards: the coppice, felled at short intervals, provided the local population with all its firewood requirements, together with small diameter material for making tools, fencing, household implements, and indeed much of the structure of their dwellings. But there remained a need for larger diameter timber for posts, beams and rafters to go into buildings from humble hovels right up to cathedrals, and this material was often provided by the scattering of mature trees, or standards, that dotted the coppice. These trees dwarfed the coppice, and many of their limbs were free to arch over the low coppice canopy, providing useful curved pieces of wood that could be turned into braces and brackets for incorporation into buildings or even ships.
Another feature in Blean Woods that is better viewed in winter can be found at its boundary with a neighbouring field. Young coppice regrowth is very palatable to farm animals, so coppice woods adjoining pasture needed protection. Before the advent of barbed wire and stock fencing, the only way to keep farm animals out of your property was by the use of a palisade – effectively a solid fence of cleft panels that was extraordinarily extravagant in its use of wood - or else a hedge, and there are occasional stretches around the reserve where remnants of a “laid” hedge can still be seen. As hedges age, their prolific upper realms tend to shade out lower branches, that then die, creating gaps through which livestock can squeeze. The tradition therefore developed of “laying” hedges. This essentially involved partially slicing through the stems of each hedging plant near its base, and bending it over, so that branches which were formerly high in the air and performing no useful function were now much closer to ground level and therefore effective at keeping animals in their place. The precise methods adopted varied around the country, often involving the addition of stakes and horizontal, woven lengths (binders) to increase the hedge’s strength; even the cutting tool used had regional variations in shape and name (handbill, billhook, cleaver and so on). Perhaps the best example is near Rough Common where tall stems, freed from the tyranny of the billhook, now surge upwards from an abandoned beech hedge: but at their base can be seen limbs still growing horizontally, where they were “laid” over a hundred years ago. More interesting still, if you follow these laid stems as they weave in and out, you will notice that they sometimes fuse together, in a process wonderfully named osculation, from the Latin “osculare” – to kiss.
Another amazing word – honed to a sublimely precise meaning, is apricity – the sensation of the sun’s warmth in winter. My thanks to Robert MacFarlane on Radio 4 for bringing to my attention a word that describes the joyous realisation that winter’s grip is loosening. We have that to look forward to.
Michael Walter
michaelwalter434@gmail.com
01227 462491
A general view of a former laid beech hedge, with stems now able to grow vertically, but with surviving evidence of “pleachers”, stems that had been partially severed, and then bent down towards the horizontal.
A close-up of a section of the laid beech hedge. If you follow along the horizontal limbs, you can see that they often fuse, or osculate, with other limbs.