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

uses; its peculiar toughness and durability underwater made it ideal for keel pieces, bilge planks, jetty piles, groyne and harbour construction, the blocks and dead eyes of ships’ rigging, the bobbins of fish nets, and, since the wood shatters when struck rather than splintering, gun carriages were always made of elm. Because of the extreme toughness and weather-resistant properties, elm boards were largely used for making coffins, lining the interior of carts, wagons or wheelbarrows, and as cladding on houses and farm buildings. The inner bark is very tough and fibrous and was woven into rope or mats and, as with alder, elm wood was used in making water pipes prior to cast iron.

      The dense grain of elm has one drawback which made old woodsmen wary of the tree: when the tree is in full leaf, a branch will suddenly, with no warning, snap and come crashing to the ground. This led to the superstition that, “The elm hateth man, and waiteth? Wych elm, or Scotch elm, which grows in northern England, Scotland and Wales and is the only species of elm native to Ireland, is a beautiful tree, smaller, broader and hardier than its southern cousin. It flourishes on hillsides or near the sea and the tree’s ability to establish itself in remote places has enabled pockets of Wych elm to survive Dutch Elm Disease.

      The word ‘wych’ came from the Saxon word meaning pliable and refers to the twigs, which can be twisted and knotted without breaking, and the elasticity of the smaller branches – some of the best longbows were made of Wych elm. The wood, though more porous than that of the common elm, is tough, hardy and weather-resistant when properly seasoned, and in the north was used for similar water-based construction as common elm was in the south. The wood becomes very flexible when steamed and was much used in making small clinker-built boats. Wych elm wood is renowned for its great strength and resistance to splitting, due to the interweaving of the wood fibres which creates a cross-grained timber. The ability to resist splitting under great stress made it ideal for wheel-making, the strength of the hub being so critical that wheelwrights sourced elm from particular regions renowned for good wood. Wych elm blocks were used for pulleys, early gunstocks and the headstocks of church bells, stair treads, floorboards, table tops and the seats of chairs.

      ASH

      Next to oaks, ash trees were probably the most highly prized for their speed of growth and the strength and elasticity of their wood. Ash thrives on fairly damp soils, provided conditions are not too acidic and there is plenty of light. It is widespread across Britain, with ash woodland found on the steep limestone slopes of the Derbyshire Peak District, in Somerset, South Wales and south-western Scotland. In Ireland, the old forests in limestone areas were once a mixed woodland of ash and elm, and although these were cleared long ago, ash is still the most common large tree in Irish lowland hedges.

      Ash wood is as tough as oak, does not splinter and is so flexible that a joist of it will bear more weight before it breaks than one of any other tree. It was used – and still is – for any implement handles that required tensile strength and shock-absorbent properties, such as axes, hammers, hoes, brooms, spades or forks. At one time ash was used for bows, arrows and spear hafts, and the name is said to derive from Aesc, the Saxon word for spear. Ash was coppiced for hop poles, ladder struts and for making the finest oars, whilst young ash shoots were used to make walking sticks, hoops, hurdles and crates. The Celtic war chariots were made of ash and, later, ash wood was in demand by cart and carriage makers – in 1901, the Coachbuilders’ Association appealed to the President of the Board of Agriculture to try to stimulate landowners to grow more of this valuable timber. The body frames of early aircraft and railway goods carriages were made of ash, and today the chassis of Morgan sports cars are still made of seasoned ash wood. Skis were once made of ash and it is commonly used for hockey sticks, snooker cues and for the hurley bat used in the popular Irish sport of hurling. ‘The clash of the ash’ is a familiar phrase used by Irish sports journalists and commentators when trying to convey the excitement of a hurling match.

      HORNBEAM AND BEECH

      Hornbeam is the hardest wood in Europe; the name derives from the Old English ‘Horn’, meaning hard, and ‘Beam?, a tree. It is found among oak and beech woods and is one of the few trees to survive alongside beech trees since it is very tenacious and can tolerate deep shade. Hornbeam makes ideal hedging when cut and layered, properties which were early appreciated, and the original maze at Hampton Court, planted in about 1514 by Cardinal Wolsey, was hornbeam hedging.

      Hornbeam timber burns with an intense heat, and because it was too hard for early carpenters to handle it was principally coppiced and pollarded for fuel, particularly in the iron ore mining districts of the south-east. However, as the quality of tools improved, the wood began to be used to yoke pairs of oxen together for ploughing, cogs for the early flour mills, and spokes for wheels. Hornbeam wood is able to resist any amount of heavy blows and so it became commonly used for making butchers’ blocks, mallet heads, balls, skittles and piano hammers.

      Hornbeam is frequently mistaken for beech – Nicholas Culpepper referred to it in his Complete Herbal’(1653) as ‘the other rough sort of beech’ – as they share the same habitat and have leaves of a similar shape and verdancy. Common beech is a much finer tree, though, which, when left undisturbed, can grow to forty metres in height. Coppiced beech was used as faggots for firing kilns, since the heating power of beech surpasses that of most other woods, with the timber from standard trees having a variety of appliances for articles where a short dense grain was required, including dairy ware such as churns, bowls and butter tubs. Other uses included panels for carriages, carpenter’s planes, stonemason’s mallets, granary shovels, boot-lasts, clogs and parquet flooring.

      Beech bends beautifully and is easily turned, which makes it the ideal material for furniture, particularly chairs. Until the 1970s there were still ‘bodgers’, itinerant wood turners, working in the beech woods of the Chilterns. Bodgers specialised in making chair legs and stretcher poles, the horizontal structural members joining chair legs to prevent them from splaying. Traditionally, a bodger would buy a stand of trees from the woodland owner and set up a camp, consisting of a lean-to known as a ‘bodger’s hovel’, in which to sleep, and a shelter to house his pole lathe, chisels, axes, saws and draw knives. After felling a suitable tree, the bodger would cut it into billets approximately the length of a chair leg and these would then be split with a sledgehammer and wedges, trimmed with a side axe, tidied with the drawknife and turned to shape on the pole lathe. Chair legs and stretchers would be stored in piles until the greenwood had dried and then taken to one of the large chair-making centres, the largest of which was High Wycombe, the centre of the Windsor chair industry.

      BEECH WAS EXTENSIVELY USED BY CRAFTSMEN WHO SPECIALISED IN MAKING BOOT AND SHOE TREES. HANDMADE SHOES AND BOOTS ALWAYS HAD A CORRESPONDING SET OF WOODEN TREES, CARVED TO REPLICATE THE SHAPE OF THE FOOT AND LEG AND MAINTAIN THE STRUCTURE OF THE ARTICLE.

      In the days when there were dozens of military and civilian boot makers in London and many hundreds in the provinces, beech was extensively used by craftsmen who specialised in making boot and shoe trees. Handmade shoes and boots always had a corresponding set of wooden trees, carved to replicate the shape of the foot and leg and maintain the structure of the article. These were particularly important with riding boots, which soon lose their shape unless remoulded by boot trees after each time they are worn. Sadly, with the escalating cost of handmade boots and shoes, the art of tree making is fast disappearing and only a handful of such craftsmen remain.

      As with hornbeam, beech is a common hedging plant and was often planted along the tops of earthbank field boundaries. The most famous and tallest beech hedge in the world is the great hedge of Meikelour, near Blairgowrie, which can be seen beside the A93 between Perth and Blairgowrie. This fantastic living sculpture, which forms part of the boundary of the Meikelour Estate owned by the Marquis of Lansdowne, is over 30 metres high and 530 metres long. It was planted in the autumn of 1745 by