A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside. Johnny Scott

honey fungus, beefsteak, velvet shank or beech tuft on old stumps; oyster mushrooms, chanterelles, boleti, Caesar’s mushrooms, morels, puffballs and sometimes fly agaric and death cap. To all of these, Nanny Pratt would cry, ‘Don’t you go near them.’ Autumn was nutting time, when the trug was filled with clusters of hazelnuts in their little green caps, sweet chestnuts or blackberries and rose hips. Winter was my favourite time of the year. I loved the silence of the woods, the long shadows and the stark eeriness of bare trees, the red, citron, russet, black, bronze or copper of fallen leaves and the musty, mouldy smell of decay.

      Sometimes, when the frost was hard on the ground, we would smell wood smoke and come across the farm men coppicing chestnut trees for fencing stobs. They would cut the poles to length and stack the ‘cords’ to dry until the following winter, or split dry poles from the previous year with sledge hammers and chisels, loading the split wood onto a four-wheeled box wagon, whilst the carthorses stood patiently in the shafts. The woods were coppiced on a rotational cycle and the areas to be cut were known as coups. Hazel was coppiced every six to eight years, chestnut every ten to fifteen years, ash every twenty, hornbeam twenty-five, and oak, around fifty years.

      One winter, a family of charcoal burners set up camp in Drew’s Rough, a hornbeam wood to the north of the farm, cutting and stacking the wood to dry for burning. Their arrival was an endless source of rumour and gossip among the farm men: charcoal burners lived in huts made of turfs and were worse than gypsies for thievery and poaching. They ate badgers, hedgehogs, squirrels, snails and little woodland birds which they caught with bird-lime made from fermented holly bark; were immune to the bites of adders, which they caught with their hands, skinning them and selling the fat to people who believed it cured deafness and rheumatism. I thought they sounded fascinating, and my one ambition was to be taken to visit the camp, but needless to say, as far as Nanny Pratt and indeed everyone else on the farm was concerned, Drew’s Rough was a place to be avoided.

      In the early spring, Nanny Pratt took her annual fortnight’s holiday and she was replaced by a young woman from an agency. By then, all anxieties over the charcoal burners had been forgotten. They kept to the wood and were rarely seen; nothing had been reported stolen, nor had any of them been caught poaching. With my sister away, there was no one to contradict me when I suggested to Miss Knowles that Drew’s Rough would be a pleasant place for our afternoon walk. I did not actually know where the charcoal burners were working, and I suspect that my curiosity would have been satisfied by simply watching them unobserved from the safety of the trees, if we ever found their camp.

      As it happens, one moment we were ambling along the old, sunken, leaf-filled drove road that ran through Drew’s Rough and the next we came round a bend to find ourselves in a clearing, where the filthiest man I had ever seen was shovelling earth onto a circular pile of logs. A horse and cart laden with cut cords was being led down a track into the clearing by another man, whilst a third loaded cords from a stack onto a wheelbarrow with four uprights rather than a body, known as a ‘charcoal burners’ mare’. There were the remains of a fire that had burnt down, with a heap of hessian gunny sacks filled with charcoal beside it, partially covered by a tarpaulin. Across the clearing, where the ground rose, were several huts made of poles, turfs and canvas, shaped like wigwams. A blackened cooking pot hung on a tripod in front of them, and nearby two children played with a scruffy mongrel chained to a stake. Until now, the men had been concentrating on their work and we might have slipped away unnoticed, but the dog saw us and started to bark; two women emerged from the huts and everyone stopped and stared at us.

      We couldn’t leave now, so we walked across the clearing to the man with the shovel and the two women – Joe Botting, our gardener, told me later that charcoal burners’ women were known as ‘Motts’ – came down to join him. He wore the greasy wreckage of a trilby hat, Derby tweed trousers, hobnailed boots, a collarless flannel shirt and an old waistcoat. Everything – his unshaven face, neck, arms and his clothes – was black with charcoal grime. The two women were no cleaner; one was lank and sinewy, with dirty black hair hanging in a rope down her back, wearing a threadbare jersey, a man’s jacket and a thick tweed skirt, with her skinny bare legs thrust into a pair of cut-off gumboots. The other wore oily dungarees and an army greatcoat. Both of them, like the man, had dark obsidian eyes, smelt of stale wood smoke and seemed to have soot ingrained in their skin.

      A BLACKENED COOKING POT HUNG ON A TRIPOD IN FRONT OF THEM, AND NEARBY TWO CHILDREN PLAYED WITH A SCRUFFY MONGREL CHAINED TO A STAKE. UNTIL NOW, THE MEN HAD BEEN CONCENTRATING ON THEIR WORK AND WE MIGHT HAVE SLIPPED AWAY UNNOTICED, BUT THE DOG SAW US AND STARTED TO BARK.

      ‘Good afternoon,’ said Miss Knowles, ‘We’re from the farmhouse. This is Major Scott’s son,’ succinctly establishing our credentials. This was met with a stony silence, whilst the three of them stared at us unnervingly. Then the skinny one said in a high, rasping voice, ‘Ooh, look at ‘im. Look at his hair, innit booful?’ In those days, I had a mop of blond curls which Nanny Pratt made me wear rather on the long side. I loathed them, because it made me look girlish. The skinny woman seemed to agree: ‘Innit a crime for a boy to have hair like that? What I wouldn’t give for curls like them.’ At this, she gave what was no doubt intended to be an encouraging smile, exposing the stumps of her teeth and, stretching her hands with their long, blackened fingernails towards me, attempted to fondle my hair. At that, my nerve broke and I ran squealing out of the clearing with her horrid cackling laughter ringing in my ears, back down the old drove road towards home. For years afterwards, I was plagued with nightmares of those hands reaching out for me and the clumping footsteps that followed as I ran through the leaves.

      OUR WORKING BRITISH WOODLANDS

      Timber was nature’s greatest gift to mankind, and coppicing is the oldest form of woodmanship, practised from the time early man discovered that the stump of a felled tree produced a self-renewing supply of timber, until well into the twentieth century. The earliest archaeological records of coppicing in Britain were discovered on the Somerset Levels in 1970, when peat diggers unearthed part of a wooden roadway, the timbers from which have been carbon dated to 3900 BC. The Sweet Track, named after its discoverer, Ray Sweet, extended across the waterlogged marshes between an island at Westhay and a ridge of high ground at Shapwick, a distance close to 2,000 metres. The track is one of a network that once crossed the Levels, connecting Neolithic island communities with each other. It is an elaborate structure, engineered from coppiced poles of ash, oak and lime driven into the swamp to support a walkway that mainly consisted of split oak planks laid end-to-end. The Sweet Track and archaeological remains of Neolithic hut construction clearly indicate that there was an existing culture of coppiced ash, oak, hornbeam and lime to provide straight poles of about 5 metres, for structural supports, with hazel rods and willow withies for wattle-and-daub walling.

      There was, of course, no shortage of material; the British Isles were then almost completely covered in wildwood, except for the areas of salt marsh to the south-west and east, coastal sand dunes, wetlands and the high mountains of northern England, Wales and Scotland, where scrub gave way to heather. Gradually, during the 6,000 years since the Ice Age ended, Britain became colonised, first by the tundra tree species – birch, aspen, juniper, mountain ash and sallow – and then these were followed in more or less chronological order by pine, yew, hazel, alder, sessile and pedunculate oak, lime, wych elm, holly, ash, maple, wild cherry, crab apple, black poplar, beech and hornbeam. There was little or no hindrance to their growth; the nomadic hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic period made less impact than the herbivores they hunted. Aurochs, elk, red deer and wild boar would have inhibited regrowth in clearings created by fallen trees and on large areas of land where poor soil type led to sparse woodland growth.

      By the time of the Neolithic migration, the composition and structure of the wild wood would have varied considerably between the different regions of Britain, with a complex pattern of local variation reflecting differences in soil type and depth. Southern Britain would have been covered with oak woodland on relatively infertile soil; lime woodland probably dominated fertile, non-calcareous