Episode 2 Tales from the Wild Wood

Britain was once an island of trees.

For 10,000 years, they have shaped our landscapes.

And we were once a woodland people.

We managed our forests carefully, cutting and coppicing,

and they thrived under our care.

But forestry has changed.

In the last century plantations have replaced many of our woods.

Others have been deemed unprofitable and abandoned.

Can they survive in the 21st Century?

Writer and woodsman Rob Penn believes so.

Here we go!

And for the next year he is taking over

Strawberry Cottage Wood, 50 acres of unmanaged woodland in South Wales.

Oh, my God. I feel like I'm going into a jungle!

Can he bring this forgotten forest back to life again?

After two months in the woods the seasons are beginning to change.

It was down to minus ten, people are saying.

It is time for Rob to learn the ancient skills of coppicing.

So is the top of that good enough for a pea stick?

And discover new markets for his cut timber.

It is one of the most efficient fuels in the world.

Can he recruit enough help to get through the coldest months

and bring his wood under control?

We've impacted one quarter of an acre and there are

acres and acres and acres of untouched woodland down there.

It's November in South Wales.

The leaves have fallen and the ground is wet with rain.

Rob has been working in Strawberry Cottage Wood for eight weeks now

and his life has adjusted to the new routine.

Winter has arrived, the weather has turned, pretty ferocious,

there's a mean wind out of the north-west blowing.

It's very cold and I'm taking a bucket of feed over to the pigs.

I've been in the woods for six weeks

and this has become part of my daily ritual, come rain or shine.

In October Rob picked up two Tamworth pigs, hoping they would clear an area

of bracken and brambles along one edge of the wood.

Here little pigs, it's breakfast.

This ground has been heavily dug up

and it's like a mire in Flanders Fields now.

Come on, chaps. Up we come.

Oh, my word it's very, very muddy!

So this was bracken and brambles above head height

and you can see the extraordinary change that they've already made.

And it's a very simple process

of throwing their feed into here.

And they root and scramble about for their pig rolls

and thereby trample over

and tread and churn up this.

You only have to look at these animals to know how effective

they're going to be in here. 600 kilos of Rotavator.

The pigs have cleared an area the size of a tennis court.

Get in there!

They are guided by their sense of smell,

which is a thousand times more sensitive than humans.

We've used them for centuries to hunt truffles,

and more recently to sniff out explosives and drugs.

We're not doing anything original here.

The ancestors of these pigs would have worked in British woodlands

for at least a thousand years.

In a sense they are designed for this job,

for rooting on the forest floor.

In the heart of Strawberry Cottage wood,

the bare branches allow sunlight to hit the woodland floor.

For the first time, Rob can see out of the trees.

What causes the transformation in the wood this time of year

is the sap falling.

So the leaves come off the trees, they tumble down to the ground

and the sap is in retreat to the heart of the tree.

The tree is preparing itself for winter

and this is call to arms for the woodsman.

The winter is the time for industry in the woods.

If Rob is to make this woodland work, the next four months are critical.

Now is the time when timber can be harvested

and the heavy work carried out.

So when I took over this wood at the end of summer

I didn't really know what was here, so thick was the canopy,

and so dense was the vegetation, but at this time of year

the character of the woodland begins to reveal itself.

So what I discovered is that there is a lot of this - hazel coppices

and there are also a lot of standards, big old growth oak

and ash trees and that suggests that the wood was managed using

a system called coppice with standards.

A woodland management system that has been popular in Britain

since the Middle Ages.

Coppice with standards allows big standard trees such as oak

to grow tall and supply large amounts of high quality timber.

In between these are smaller trees such as hazel

which are cut back or coppiced more regularly

and their wood used for fuel.

Perfected over centuries, this technique allowed

a permanent forest to exist whilst providing a never-ending supply

of woodland products to the community.

But in the 21st century, our coppicing only continues

in a few remaining woodlands.

To learn the skills of a coppice worker,

Rob has come to Westonbirt Arboretum, where Brian Williamson

has been restoring a much larger hazel wood.

-Brian, how are you?

-I'm very well. How are you?

-Good morning.

-Good.

-Welcome to the Westonbirt woods.

Thank you very much. Well, it's lovely to be here.

So, Brian, how has this happened,

why has it fallen out of management and turned into this wood?

It's simple economics really.

Labour charges went up in the 20th century, cheap plastics,

mass production came in so you could buy steel products,

plastic products very cheaply and people stopped buying wood.

And as soon as you take the money out of it

there's no reason for people to manage them.

Our coppiced woods were once the oilfields of Britain.

Since Roman times they have supplied local industries

with millions of tonnes of charcoal.

Many counties also had their own regional industry.

Sussex supported communities of clog makers.

Hampshire provided millions of fence posts and gates

and up until the 1970s, bark from oak coppice

supported the Cumbrian tanning industry.

Brian and Rob need to find a modern day market for their products.

But in an abandoned coppice,

the quality of the timber quickly deteriorates.

What you've got is nothing but a bit of low value firewood in here.

For good quality coppice you want straight poles

because most of the market is in things like hurdling rods,

binders for hedge laying, steaks for hedge laying, things like that.

-That's where the money is?

-That's where the money in hazel coppice is.

So you want these straight poles by the hundreds?

Yes, if not the thousands.

To create a productive coppice takes many years of cutting.

The area Brian first cut ten years ago

is only just returning to its original productivity.

So what we've got here, Rob, and what we're working on

-is coppice that we cut six years ago.

-OK.

So when you look at this stool and the stool is basically

the base of the tree after it's been cut down,

-you're looking at stems six years old...

-Yeah.

..coming back from the cut stump.

So you can see how the production is beginning to go up.

We're getting more rods per stool

and this'll keep happening every time we cut it.

The new rods have grown back at almost triple the density.

But Rob must also learn how each piece of wood can be used.

Good enough for a pea stick... Is the top of that

good enough for a pea stick? So I've got a piece of hazel now.

I think, yes, that would probably do.

Just about. Do I want to take it off at about here?

-Erm...you want about five feet.

-Five feet, OK.

There's an old adage in wood working about keeping everything

as long as you can for as long as you can,

because you never quite know what you're going to use it for

and if you cut it down to length too soon

you might lose the best use of it.

My eyes have been opened to the extraordinary variety of products

that you get out of it.

There are bean poles, poles for tomato sticks and other stuff.

You know, material for making hurdles

and that's all from this area of hazel coppice all cut with that.

Coppicing doesn't just produce timber,

it also prolongs the life of the tree.

And at Westonbirt, Brian has the perfect illustration.

This is coppice management at its best, at its most long lived

and this lime which is one tree or was one tree,

-is thought to have been coppiced for around 2,000 years.

-Really?

It's been DNA tested to be a single specimen.

It could have been a Roman soldier

-who coppiced this the first time round.

-Extraordinary.

And we're standing in the middle of one tree and look at it.

It's kind of 20, 30 feet all around us.

People are always concerned, you cut something down you kill it,

yet cutting this down repeatedly is what's kept it going

because lime isn't an especially a long lived tree of its own accord,

you know, two or three hundred years and yet this one's been going

2,000 years solely because it's been regularly cut.

Gosh, isn't that fantastic?

Every 25 years since the time of Julius Caesar,

this tree has been cut down -

its bark used to make rope,

its trunk made into scaffolding poles and fence posts.

And at every cut, the ageing process is reset,

allowing the tree to continue to grow for two millennia.

They say that the first conservationists were woodsman

and that woods were managed sustainably

long before the word was invented.

Now that's because of the self-renewing property of trees

and people recognised this long ago that if you manage woods well

they carried on producing the products that they wanted

and could use, and that really is at the heart

of the whole story of woodland management in Britain.

Back in Strawberry Cottage Wood, it is time

to put Brian's advice into practice.

And to help him get started, Rob has called in the local woodland group.

So thank you very much all for coming.

The job we're going to do today is we're going to coppice

some of the old hazel stools.

As you can see they're all very old and haven't been touched for ages.

It's going to be quite tangly to take down

but there's plenty of wood in there

for whatever we propose to do with it afterwards.

The hazel stools dominate the top part of the wood.

They have not been touched for over 50 years.

By coppicing them, Rob will remove the large overgrown stems

and let new straighter shoots grow up from the base.

They're doing well, aren't they?

I'm surprised how fast they've got on with it,

how quickly we've cleared the patch.

If we can have all these people everyday,

we wouldn't be long about it. We'd be out of the wood and gone.

There are over 750 woodland groups in Britain.

They manage over 100,000 acres of woodland.

Many of this group will get their firewood from these stools.

A huge amount of wood is coming out, so this pile here is all hazel

and this will be used in due course to make charcoal

so we're stacking it up here because we're going to bring the kiln

to this part of the wood, probably to right here,

this exact spot, I suspect.

The piles of brash, this is all the top of the hazel coppice

you can't do much with it. It'll be habitat for birds,

ground nesting birds at some point

and then we're beginning to get a clearing.

So suddenly we've got some sky into the wood.

So it's beginning to take shape, you know,

and suddenly it looks like a woodland under management

for the first time in a very long time, which is very exciting.

By the end of the day the group has cleared six stools

and the woodland has changed dramatically.

But overnight the Welsh winter closes in

and it's a very different scene the next morning.

It was an incredibly cold night last night.

It was down to minus ten people are saying

and so I'm hoping that a little bit of activity in the wood

will warm me up nicely.

There are still over 150 hazel stools in the top part of the wood

and from now on Rob is working on his own.

It is extraordinary how much timber comes out of each individual stool

and in terms of what we plan to coppice in this bit of the wood,

you know, we've only just begun.

For the next three weeks Rob must work hard.

These trees can be a vital source of income.

November turns into December and after days of blisters

and aching joints, Rob slowly develops a rhythm to his coppicing.

If you want to learn about woods you have to get involved.

You have to work.

By Christmas, a substantial clearing has been created

and Rob's work has produced a much larger pile of timber than expected.

I started making this series to encourage people

back into woodland management.

But the reality is if we all produced as much wood as I am

the market for bean poles and pea sticks or whatever would be flooded.

I can't help but wonder if there isn't another way

that we could be using all this wood.

Finding a modern use for coppice timber is vital

if Rob is to make money from the wood.

In Carmarthenshire two men have spent almost a quarter of a century

trying to solve this puzzle.

Bill Owens and Richard Edwards manage 65 acres of birch and willow coppice

outside Llandeilo in West Wales.

They believe they have found a new role for woodlands

which otherwise would be neglected.

The one issue over the next 20 years is all fossil fuels

are going to increase in price, there's no way

the price of oil is ever going to come down.

There's no way the price of gas will come down.

What we have in place of that is wood which we can use.

Woodlands like Richard's would've once provided the local village

with firewood and fuel.

In the 19th century cheap coal and oil replaced these,

but Richard now believes he's found a way

to bring wood fuel back into use.

We have a process here where we're able to produce

-a completely new type of wood fuel.

-OK.

Which offers real increased efficiencies.

Wood has been overlooked as a fuel

because it is heavy to transport and has a low burning temperature.

Richard's idea is that by drying the wood for eight hours

in a wood fired oven, you can create a lighter and more efficient fuel.

This is all about taking the water content out.

You remove the water and it becomes a much more efficient fuel.

It lights easier, it carries easier

and you get much more out of it per ton.

We have probably in the whole of Britain half a million acres,

at least of unmanaged woodland which is absolutely full

to the top of small useless round wood.

Here is its end use.

We haven't any doubt at all that it will end up as a profitable

end product.

Richard's idea is that our small woodlands could play a role

in meeting our future energy demands.

And by doing so we could bring thousands of acres of neglected wood

back under management.

So, this is the end product.

Yeah. It's had eight hours at a gentle roast

and we have a product which is wood which has no water in it at all.

We can test it with the moisture meter

which will prove the issue that...

So it's flashing between 0 and 1 and 2%.

Yeah, it is one of the most efficient fuels in the world.

Normal seasoned firewood is 25% water.

Richard's drying technique removes this, making it both lighter

and more efficient as a fuel.

So the beauty of this whole process is the simplicity.

The only thing we don't know is just how hot this wood burns.

-But Dave, Richard's engineer... Dave, how are you doing?

-Fine.

..is going to show me. Can we stick that one on?

-We'll give it a go.

-Fantastic.

Burning normal hazel like this would create temperatures

of around 200 degrees centigrade.

So how hot will this get, Dave?

-It could get close to 400 degrees C.

-What?!

We try to hold it back because that is getting quite hot.

-That's phenomenal.

-Richard has indeed transformed his coppice

from waste wood into an almost smokeless super-fuel.

What's intriguing about this is that it's a return to the way

that coppice wood has been used for centuries -

providing local communities with local wood.

Can it work commercially now?

I just don't know, but certainly I'd like to give it a go in spring

and see if I can provide my local woodland group with fuel.

Back in Strawberry Cottage Wood, the coppicing work continues.

The wood is changing.

But months working alone is also having an effect on Rob.

Far away from the madness of men.

Months under the canopy is bringing out his inner woodsman.

They say the proximity of the past is close in woodlands.

I suppose that's something to do with the fact that

it hadn't changed in thousands of years.

And somehow that reconnects us

with the human matrix...

..with nature.

Rob is experiencing what many people feel in the woods.

They are our main lines to nature, places we can escape to.

Whereas once we all lived within them,

nowadays only a few people remain.

And they have a unique relationship with the trees.

Way-hay, hello!

Iliff Simey has spent 25 years

living in a cabin in a small woodland in North Wales.

Rob is here to learn the unique approach to management

that Iliff has developed.

Oh, my Lord! He's the size of a tree.

-Iliff.

-Dr Livingston, I presume.

ROB LAUGHS

-Good morning, sir, nice to meet you.

-Come and have some coffee.

Oh, excellent, thank you very much. What a beautiful piece of wood.

Iliff's dream has been to restore the natural balance

that existed here long before humans were around.

I'm restoring the woodland as a whole, the complete eco-system.

That's the special feature of this valley,

it has no economic value but it has an immense value

as a demonstration of how the natural forest works

in the British climate. I'm like a doctor or a nurse

giving a helping hand in restoring the woodland.

But the woodland should eventually stand on its own feet.

If we get the conditions right nature will take off.

Iliff employs a woodsman to carry out work normally done by nature.

Today he is cutting the branches off a tree

to leave only the trunk remaining.

Here, when Paul has cut the top off, what are you left with?

-The decaying trunk that's standing there.

-Which will be dead

-and then begins to decay?

-Yes.

-Ah, right.

We want it to decay because all sorts of creepy crawlies

will live in there from spiders to earwigs and so on.

These are food for many of the birds, especially the woodpeckers.

In a natural woodland we require 25 of these to the acre

and of a bigger diameter to match a natural woodland.

OK, so that's to provide habit for.

In 20 acres, you see, I should have over 100 of these.

-Yeah.

-And I've got nothing like.

-Right.

Iliff's priority is not to create a wood that delivers timber,

but one which provides a rich home for local plants and animals.

So my instinct probably would have been to fell this tree completely,

but of course by doing it this way you've taken a lot of the wood off the top

and what you're left with is this standing trunk

which is going to decay slowly over years

and that will become a wildlife hotel.

But Iliff's wood also has another role.

It provides refuge to a man who has suffered huge loss in his lifetime.

I've had some really low moments in my life.

Perhaps the greatest was when my youngest son died of leukaemia...

..and it took three and a half years

and I was living here...

..and I found the woodland...

Sorry.

It's quite difficult. It starts coming back, but it's good for me,

it brings it out.

The woodland took me in its arms

and in its fold...

..and healed me all the time.

I think if I hadn't had the woodland I might well have crashed.

But I still get moments when I feel very vulnerable.

I found the best thing to do is break off, come out

and work in the woodland for half a day.

When I go back to the house for a cup of tea or whatever,

I'm healed, I'm back to normal again.

Rob's work has also had its own healing role.

My dad died very suddenly towards the end of last year and...

I was surprised at how little time I had to think about him,

think about my relationship with him and, you know,

go through the process of grieving.

And I found that by coming to the woods I was provided that time.

There is a sort of cathedral aspect to being in an ancient wood

and so it was for me very powerful and I was very grateful,

you know, that I had the wood to go to, to think about dad

and go through the whole grieving process.

New year comes around and the weather begins to warm.

In Strawberry Cottage Wood, it has now been two months

since the pigs first arrived. Their time here has come to an end

and their owner Ray Harris has come to pick them up.

So this is where we've been feeding them most recently, Ray.

Yeah, it does look a lot different to what it did before.

Yeah, I mean it was an overhead thicket

of bracken and brambles, they've done a fantastic job.

You know, they've cleared whole areas, Ray. Yeah.

Oh, look, here she is, here she is. Come to see you, Ray.

I know, I know. She's looking good too, isn't she?

-Will you miss them when they go?

-I will, you know, I will.

-Yeah.

-I'll particularly miss him.

-He's a character, isn't he?

-He's a great character. He's been very, very companionable.

-Yeah.

He always, I mean, I know I'm always turning up with a bucket of feed

but he always looks genuinely pleased to see me.

So when you take them away what happens next, Ray?

-I'm afraid it's off to the abattoir for them.

-Is it really?

-I'm afraid so.

-Oh, God.

I suppose that's the natural course of things, isn't it?

It'll be a shame because they're great creatures.

I feel quite sad they've gone.

You know I miss them at two levels.

They worked hard, they did the hard yards in the wood.

They cleared a large area and for that service I'm very grateful.

But they were also very good companions.

I looked forward to coming to see them each day and you know,

you spend a lot of time on your on in the woods

and they were there and you develop a relationship with them.

They're really very friendly and we are now a pig-less wood again.

Next time at Strawberry Cottage Wood, Rob is off to explore

Britain's timber industry.

They cut more timber here in an hour

than I've coppiced in an entire winter.

He tries to fell trees in his own wood.

Could be fireworks now.

And persuade local experts to buy them.

Who cut this? Who cut this like that? What a waste.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd