This morning we went back in history to get some coppice. Coppice comes from coppice trees and these trees together form a coppice. The act of cutting branches of coppice is known as coppicing. This linguistic simplicity goes some way to show how ancient this process is and while doing it I did feel like I was acting out some ancient rite.
Coppice is used mainly for making fences and reinforcing hedges (through the act of ‘laying down’ the hedge). Coppice grows quickly from the base in long, thin branches which are strong and flexible. As long as you leave some part of the tree to grow you can cut off any size of branch – a long thick one for the support of a fence or thin branches to weave between them. Coppice appears to be a universally useful tree. At every stage of it’s growth it can be used for some form of construction in many ways and because it’s so fast growing a small area the size of a tennis court or two can support a coppicing business.
The coppice we were in was not in great shape as it hadn’t been maintained but it still had a beautiful aura about it. The thin, tall coppice trees reaching for the sky left a lot of space for bluebells on the ground and a small stream ran through the coppice. My job was to wander around the coppice looking for long, straight branches about 2 inches in diameter, cutting them down and removing the leafy tops. These could have been used for detail work, but we left them behind. Then, having made four bundles of eight foot long branches, we started lugging them across the field to the car which couldn’t make it across the mud. Real medieval stuff, and tough work.
What we’re going to actually do with our coppice is unclear at the moment. There are sections of the fence by the house that M wants to close up and a new section is to be built to hide the shed from the rear windows of the house. After that, the hedge behind me needs to be laid down to stop it thinning out. If it thins out too much the cows will get through and fall on my caravan as it’s about 10 feet up a slope. Apparently this isn’t so urgent, though I might beg to differ.