Norfolk Conservation Corps - More Information

The History of the Corps: The Story So Far, Volume 3
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On the fifteenth of January, 1978 (in the good ol' days) seventeen volunteers were on a task at Barton Broad, under the direction of Peter Stevens, then the Director of the Norfolk Naturalists' Trust. (This really was the good ol' days.)

"I would like these trees felled," said Peter.

Eddie, looking at the trees in question, said, "Do you really mean felled, or do you actually mean coppiced?"

"Do you know the difference?" asked Peter, apparently surprised.

"But of course," said Eddie.

"In that case," said Peter, delightedly, "I want them coppiced."

The Norfolk Conservation Corps was, on that day, only forty-two days old and this was only our third task, but it was an indication of how wonderful it was for wildlife in Norfolk that the Corps had been set up. We've done an awful lot of work since then, and we've certainly done a lot of coppicing, thereby not only conserving wildlife, but also conserving an extremely ancient practice.

Coppicing is a very old woodland-management technique, which is thought to have been used for nearly six thousand years, the evidence for this coming from the Somerset Levels. Ancient trackways, laid to provide a firm footing for people crossing these fens, have been discovered, and some of the material used seems to have been harvested coppice poles. The Sweet Track was the first of these to be found, one and a quarter miles of it, and it has been dated back, by radio-carbon dating, to 5,765 B.C. (Before Corps').

Coppicing is a way of harvesting wood from the wood without losing the wood, and it was probably "invented" by chance by Neolithic man. The Neolithic people would have cut down the trees in an area for their own purposes, leaving the trees which were too big for them to handle, then would have moved on. Eventually they would have returned to the original area to find that the stumps left from the previous felling had thrown out many side-shoots, and these could now be harvested.

This management system was later refined and developed into the system we use today. Now coppicing is carried out on a precise rotation system. A wood is divided into enough sections to cover the rotation period to be used, then one section is cut each winter until all have been cut. It is then time to harvest the regrowth from the first section. The felling technique has also been refined so that the trees are now felled using a steeply sloping cut, this cut sloping outwards so that rainwater will run off to the ground, and the cut stumps, the coppice "stool", will not rot.

After a tree has been correctly coppiced, many new shoots grow from the coppice stool, each developing into a leading shoot, each stool thereby producing many coppice "poles". The size of these poles is governed by the size and age of the original felled tree, the height of the coppice cut, and the period of time for which they are left to grow before they are harvested, i.e. the period of rotation.

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