Epitaph for the Ash. Lisa Samson

can thrive in wet conditions.

      An area of saplings holds yellowed shoots that have been drained of life. A bright yellow one is still sprouting from the base, though most of the tree above the infected girdle is dead. It hides behind a group of healthy green shoots. The saplings’ bark is slick with rain that trickles over a purplish gash, the mark of disease. Most of the signs of Ash Dieback in Ashwellthorpe are in the coppice growth, but the big ashes at the back of the coppice have Ash Dieback at the top and have probably had it for two or three years at least. The rooks perched on the uppermost branches are oblivious, croaking to one another in the dark heart of the wood.

      Ash is the predominant species here but it is a mixed coppice of hazel, ash, hawthorn, alder and sallow. Ash, closely followed by alder, was possibly the commonest tree to make up the forests of the Neolithic wildwood that covered the Broadlands when the sheep of Neolithic peoples began to nibble at the tasty bark and seeds, turning the woods to scrub. Much of the woodland would have been felled to make way for farming and building. By the time the Anglo-Saxons, and later the Vikings, arrived, the woods were shrinking, with fields taking over. The Domesday Book of 1081 makes reference to a large tract of woodland here, and the present day Ashwellthorpe Woods are the last vestige of its former dimensions. The woods have retained their current size since about the 1830s. Seen from above on aerial photos, they form two darker blocks of green among the patches of yellow cereals, pale green wheat and brown ploughed land.

      Behind Ashwellthorpe Hall, to the east of the wood, the remains of an Anglo-Saxon burial site were found, so it is safe to assume that there has been a settlement here since the early Anglo-Saxons arrived between AD 500 and 700. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who came to East Anglia in search of a better life, would in all probability have approached Ashwellthorpe (then unnamed) from one of the tributaries of the Waveney river, which then reached nearly to the sea in the south. The dark ash wood would have risen from the lush marshlands and mud banks, a welcome sight on the terraqueous landscape, providing shelter and respite from the sun. Anglo-Saxons tended to live in isolated farmsteads of one or two family groupings, eschewing the larger towns and fortresses founded by the Romans in favour of a simple rural life.

      Lower Ashwellthorpe Wood has an industrial history that dates back centuries, serving the local communities with faggots, hurdles and poles. We pass a group of ash that has grown in straight lines and would make strong, flexible poles, essential if you were going to build a structure of any kind. The Farming Journal of Randall Burroughs provides evidence of the various uses made of Ashwellthorpe Wood. Burroughs was a gentleman farmer from Wymondham who maintained a log of his daily business that is of little literary interest but of great historical value. We can connect the ash trees of Ashwellthorpe Woods with Burroughs’s regular acquisition of hurdles. On Monday, 21 February 1796 he states: ‘Fetched a load of hurdles from Ashwellthorpe Wood for Wm Gray.’ Gray was clearly a local veterinary surgeon, or someone who assumed the function of one, because on Sunday, 24 February 1799, Burroughs wrote:

      On Wednesday Nelson went to Ashwellthorpe Wood for a load of hurdles namely 3 dozen & deposited them in the 12 Acre. On Thursday to Wicklewood & borrow’d 3 doz gate hurdles of Mr Bernard. On Friday the ewes and lambs viz 46 ewes, 49 lambs & 21 wethers were hurdled upon the 12 Acre. The lambs had been gelt on Tuesday by Wm Gray. The night was very rainy but they all recovered without ointment.

      The hurdles he purchased were almost certainly made of ash and were used traditionally to hold livestock in place for routine operations, such as neutering or shearing. It is an example of how ash from these woods has served the needs of the farming community and advanced their interests.

      Prior to the Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s acquisition of the wood in the 1980s, it had been owned and worked by the Co-operative Society, which coppiced ash poles for broom handles and hazel brush for their heads. For centuries until the 1970s a brush factory in Wymondham obtained all its ash poles from Ashwellthorpe Woods. It employed many local women, who were highly skilled and worked for half the wage that men received. The Victorian historian William Kiddier recorded an ongoing battle that began in 1829 when male journeymen complained that the women were undercutting them. Kiddier laid the blame at the feet of the employers for exploiting the women, who were often so poor that they were simply glad of the work to support their families and did not dare to quibble over their pay. There is now a museum of broom-making at the former factory in Wymondham, which describes the plight of the local women who worked there for generations.

      Lower Wood still has the feel of a working wood, with one well-trodden path in a regular shape, as if it was marked out by lines of coppicing and collection; there are few of the smaller tracks that children make in woodlands used for leisure. The clumps of thick, taller ashes seem impenetrable: the trees seem to have closed ranks, as if to prevent human foraging. Perhaps it is their response to the over-exploitation of centuries of industry, or maybe they are hiding the signs of Ash Dieback that are evident in their bare crowns. Steve Collin knows of trees in Norfolk that started showing signs of incremental growth loss six years ago but at the time no one realized what it was. That particular plantation has completely succumbed to the disease.

      At Lower Ashwellthorpe Wood, there will be one final harvest of the timber that can be sold for firewood, when the dead trees are coppiced and removed in the cycle of woodland management. Once the infected ash has been coppiced it won’t grow back, and infected timber can’t be used because the disease stains it. Steve was advised by European experts to fell any ash the instant he saw wilting leaves, so that he could sell the wood before Dieback took its full effect. He wonders whether that was what happened on the Continent, whether foresters felled the trees with Ash Dieback at the first sign of the disease so that they could still make use of the wood. Such radical action would be detrimental to the ecosystem of a wood such as Ashwellthorpe, where removal of the dead wood from a forest floor with easily compacted soils and wet conditions would also take away the fungi and flora attached to it.

      There are many schemes around the country, funded by the Forestry Commission, to burn wood as an alternative to fossil fuels but they were based on the reliability of ash, which stores well, grows fast and burns better than any other wood. The ash coppiced from Lower Ashwellthorpe Wood would have enabled the woodlands to pay for themselves. Now Norfolk Wildlife Trust will have to find other sources of fuel, which may mean buying in from abroad. This would not only be expensive but potentially fraught with hazards, such as the fear that the lethal Emerald Ash Borer from America, where it has laid waste to millions of ash trees, could somehow find its way across the Atlantic.

      We pause for a moment to watch a furniture beetle and a Minotaur beetle, distinguished by its horns, crawling towards a hole in an ash, as if in a race against one another to get inside it first. The hole is almost as big as the backside of a cow and the bark has peeled back to form a thick fringe framing the exposed wood, which is gradually rotting, aided by the beetles and other insects that feed off the bark. Steve picks off the furniture beetle to show me but it walks off the end of his thumb and falls into the grass: we have inadvertently helped the Minotaur beetle to win the race. Certain epiphytes, like lichen, prefer the ash bark because oak is too acidic and there is a danger that many such rare species will be lost unless they find alternative habitats.

      Under the tree a mat of ground cover sends its leafy runners in all directions – it stretches right across the path. This is Ground Ivy, or ‘ale hoof’, as the early Saxon and Norse settlers called it. The leaves are very different from those of ivy, larger and rougher, with teeth all the way round. I rub one between my thumb and forefinger and smell it: it has a tart citrus flavour, a little like the lemon sage I grow in my garden. Apparently it was used as an alternative to hops for making beer, and the Scandinavian Vikings, who lived near the wood, would almost certainly have used it to make a fresh light ale. It likes damp places and semi-shade, so the foot of an ash is the ideal place for it; its purple flowers cling to the ivy, each with two lips to drink the rainwater. It is likely that when the Vikings dug it up they would have used spades with ash handles.

      Before leaving the wood, I stand still to look up at the canopy of a few mature ashes growing so close together they probably share the same stool under the ground. Some of their branches interlock but their crowns fan out into finely etched sprays, each leaf like a black flower, hundreds of them dancing under the raindrops that tickle my skin.