Читать книгу A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside - Johnny Scott - Страница 38

Hornbeam is the hardest wood in Europe; the name derives from the Old English ‘Horn’, meaning hard, and ‘Beam?, a tree. It is found among oak and beech woods and is one of the few trees to survive alongside beech trees since it is very tenacious and can tolerate deep shade. Hornbeam makes ideal hedging when cut and layered, properties which were early appreciated, and the original maze at Hampton Court, planted in about 1514 by Cardinal Wolsey, was hornbeam hedging.

Hornbeam timber burns with an intense heat, and because it was too hard for early carpenters to handle it was principally coppiced and pollarded for fuel, particularly in the iron ore mining districts of the south-east. However, as the quality of tools improved, the wood began to be used to yoke pairs of oxen together for ploughing, cogs for the early flour mills, and spokes for wheels. Hornbeam wood is able to resist any amount of heavy blows and so it became commonly used for making butchers’ blocks, mallet heads, balls, skittles and piano hammers.

Hornbeam is frequently mistaken for beech – Nicholas Culpepper referred to it in his Complete Herbal’(1653) as ‘the other rough sort of beech’ – as they share the same habitat and have leaves of a similar shape and verdancy. Common beech is a much finer tree, though, which, when left undisturbed, can grow to forty metres in height. Coppiced beech was used as faggots for firing kilns, since the heating power of beech surpasses that of most other woods, with the timber from standard trees having a variety of appliances for articles where a short dense grain was required, including dairy ware such as churns, bowls and butter tubs. Other uses included panels for carriages, carpenter’s planes, stonemason’s mallets, granary shovels, boot-lasts, clogs and parquet flooring.

Beech bends beautifully and is easily turned, which makes it the ideal material for furniture, particularly chairs. Until the 1970s there were still ‘bodgers’, itinerant wood turners, working in the beech woods of the Chilterns. Bodgers specialised in making chair legs and stretcher poles, the horizontal structural members joining chair legs to prevent them from splaying. Traditionally, a bodger would buy a stand of trees from the woodland owner and set up a camp, consisting of a lean-to known as a ‘bodger’s hovel’, in which to sleep, and a shelter to house his pole lathe, chisels, axes, saws and draw knives. After felling a suitable tree, the bodger would cut it into billets approximately the length of a chair leg and these would then be split with a sledgehammer and wedges, trimmed with a side axe, tidied with the drawknife and turned to shape on the pole lathe. Chair legs and stretchers would be stored in piles until the greenwood had dried and then taken to one of the large chair-making centres, the largest of which was High Wycombe, the centre of the Windsor chair industry.

BEECH WAS EXTENSIVELY USED BY CRAFTSMEN WHO SPECIALISED IN MAKING BOOT AND SHOE TREES. HANDMADE SHOES AND BOOTS ALWAYS HAD A CORRESPONDING SET OF WOODEN TREES, CARVED TO REPLICATE THE SHAPE OF THE FOOT AND LEG AND MAINTAIN THE STRUCTURE OF THE ARTICLE.

In the days when there were dozens of military and civilian boot makers in London and many hundreds in the provinces, beech was extensively used by craftsmen who specialised in making boot and shoe trees. Handmade shoes and boots always had a corresponding set of wooden trees, carved to replicate the shape of the foot and leg and maintain the structure of the article. These were particularly important with riding boots, which soon lose their shape unless remoulded by boot trees after each time they are worn. Sadly, with the escalating cost of handmade boots and shoes, the art of tree making is fast disappearing and only a handful of such craftsmen remain.

As with hornbeam, beech is a common hedging plant and was often planted along the tops of earthbank field boundaries. The most famous and tallest beech hedge in the world is the great hedge of Meikelour, near Blairgowrie, which can be seen beside the A93 between Perth and Blairgowrie. This fantastic living sculpture, which forms part of the boundary of the Meikelour Estate owned by the Marquis of Lansdowne, is over 30 metres high and 530 metres long. It was planted in the autumn of 1745 by Jean Mercer, heiress of Meikleour and Aldie, and her husband Robert Murray Nairne, who was subsequently killed at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, while fighting for the Highland Jacobite cause against Government forces under the Duke of Cumberland. Legend has it that following the death of her husband Jean Mercer would not allow the hedge to be cut, letting it to grow towards the heavens in a tribute to her husband’s memory.