This week first year permaculture students from Kinsale College had the opportunity to visit a working hazel coppice near Kealkill in West Cork, where Saul Mossbacher has been restoring a woodland into a coppice rotation over the past 8 years.
I have helped out a little during most of those years and have always come away with a few yurt poles, but this year, instead of the usual mixed bag of chunky firewood, some useful furniture-grade wood and a few yurt poles, we harvested the first re-growth from the first cut 8 years ago, which yielded hundreds of useful poles.
Traditionally a hazel coppice is harvested every 7 years once it is in proper rotation. The hard work is the first cut of a “post-mature” coppice, a neglected or unmanaged hazel wood; 7-8 years later the effort involved is finally rewarded with a harvest of long straight poles. The Coppice Association has listed over a hundred uses for hazel, from clothes-hangers to thatching spars, hurdles to bean poles.
Saul’s wood is one of the few that I know of being managed as a coppice. The different ages of the stands- from 1-year old to 7-years – ensures maximum diversity of habitat, as well as providing a truly sustainable yield of useful material.
A properly managed coppice woodland is surely one of the most powerful images of sustainability, with ancient coppice stools of over a thousand years old known to exist in Britain. Hopefully we will see a resurgence of this essential practice in the future.
