What is coppicing?

Coppicing is the oldest form of woodland management in England: you cut certain broadleaved trees - hazel, sweet chestnut, ash, lime, oak - down to a stump, and instead of dying they throw up a cluster of straight new stems, which you cut again years later, and again, on a rotation that can run for centuries. The stump is called a stool, and a coppice stool can be older than any cathedral. It is farming, but of poles instead of grain. I should be straight about the archive’s position here: it has stood in a working coppice - Lewis Goldwater established and manages his own in Herefordshire, and there is coppiced hazel along the Long Melford walk - but it has not yet spent a day documenting the cutting itself as the sole subject. So this is a definition grounded in coppices the archive has seen, with the dedicated record still to come.

Coppicing exploits a simple fact of botany: many broadleaved trees, cut down, do not die but regenerate from the stump with vigorous new growth. Managed deliberately, that gives a sustainable, endlessly renewable crop of poles without ever replanting. The cut stump is the stool; the new stems are the crop.

It is often confused with pollarding, and the difference is height. Coppicing cuts at or near ground level. Pollarding cuts higher, to a permanent trunk above the browsing reach of cattle, sheep and deer, so the regrowth is not eaten - which is why pollards are found on commons and in grazed wood pasture, and coppice in enclosed woods. Both produce the same kind of multi-stemmed regrowth; the choice between them is about whether animals can get at it.

The stool is the cut stump that regrows. A cant (also coup, coupe or fell) is the compartment cut in a given year; the wood is divided into cants so a different one is cut each year and the whole runs on a cycle. The rotation is the number of years between cuts on any one cant. Standards are timber trees - usually oak - left to grow on among the coppice, a system called coppice-with-standards that takes two crops from one wood: poles below, timber above. The underwood is the coppice crop itself.

A coppiced wood is cut in rotation, cant by cant, in winter when the sap is down. Each cut releases the stool to regrow, and the cut poles are sorted by size and use. The rotation is set by the product: hazel for hurdles, thatching spars and basket work might be cut every seven to ten years; sweet chestnut for fencing and chair-bodging billets on a longer cycle.

What it makes is the whole material base of the old countryside: hurdles and hedging stakes, thatching spars, bean poles and pea sticks, walking sticks, charcoal, firewood, and the rods for baskets and chair seats. Almost every other woodland craft in this glossary depends on it - the bodger’s beech, the basket maker’s hazel, the thatcher’s spars, the charcoal burner’s cordwood all come, ultimately, off a coppice rotation. When the markets for those products collapsed in the twentieth century, the coppices stopped being cut, grew up into neglected high forest, and the chain began to break - which is the story that recurs across this whole archive.

Coppicing is one of the few cases where a working craft and nature conservation pull in exactly the same direction. Cutting a cant throws the woodland floor open to light, and the years that follow bring a flush of woodland flowers - bluebells, primroses, wood anemones - and the insects, butterflies and birds that depend on the open, sunny conditions, before the regrowth closes the canopy again. A coppiced wood worked on rotation is therefore a shifting mosaic of light and shade, every stage present somewhere, and it supports far more species than a uniform, unmanaged wood. The decline of coppicing is part of why some woodland butterflies and flowers have retreated, and its revival is often done as much for wildlife as for poles.

Active coppicing collapsed with the markets for its products and the rise of cheap imported timber and fossil fuels; vast areas of former coppice in England now stand as overgrown, even-aged woodland that has not been cut in living memory. But it has a real, if modest, revival - led partly by the heritage-craft makers who need the material and partly by conservation bodies cutting coppice for wildlife. Where the two meet, as in a coppice worker supplying a basket maker or a thatcher, the old chain is rebuilt link by link.

It is learned in the wood, working alongside an experienced coppice worker, and through courses run by woodland and conservation organisations. The archive’s Learn a Craft directory and the crafts it is documenting next point the way.

What is the difference between coppicing and pollarding?
Both cut a tree back so it regrows multiple stems. Coppicing cuts at or near ground level, to a stool. Pollarding cuts higher up, to a permanent trunk above the reach of grazing animals, so livestock and deer cannot eat the regrowth.

How long is a coppice rotation?
It depends on the species and the product. Hazel for hurdles and thatching spars might be cut every 7 to 10 years; sweet chestnut for fencing on a longer cycle. The wood is divided into compartments (cants or coups) and each is cut in turn, so the whole wood is a rolling patchwork of ages.

Why is coppicing good for wildlife?
Cutting a compartment lets light flood the woodland floor, and the years that follow bring a flush of flowers - bluebells, primroses, anemones - and the insects and butterflies that depend on them, before the canopy closes again. A coppiced wood is a shifting mosaic of light and shade that suits far more species than dense, unmanaged woodland.