Trees That Were Worked

The word "ancient" attached to woodland means continuously wooded since at least 1600. It does not mean untouched, and in Powys it almost never does.

Woods were an agricultural asset, managed as carefully as a field and considerably more valuable per acre than most upland grazing. Understanding what they were managed for is what makes them readable.

Coppice

The dominant system. Cut a broadleaf tree near the base and it does not die; it sends up multiple stems from the stool, which are harvested on a rotation of anything from seven to thirty years depending on species and market.

Hazel on a short rotation gave hurdles, thatching spars, sheep fencing and firewood. Oak on a long rotation gave charcoal, tanbark and small timber.

A coppice stool that has been cut repeatedly grows outward. Some Welsh stools are enormous — several metres across — and are among the oldest living things in the county, considerably older than the stems standing on them.

If a wood is full of multi-stemmed trees growing from broad low bases, it was coppice.

Standards

Above the coppice, single trees were left to grow on for timber: the standards. The classic managed wood was coppice-with-standards, a two-storey crop giving small wood on rotation and building timber over decades.

Oak dominated in Powys, mostly sessile oak on the acid uplands.

Charcoal and bark

Two industries drove oak management here.

Charcoal fed the early ironworks. Before coke smelting, iron needed charcoal, and charcoal needed woodland within carting distance. The evidence is charcoal platforms — flat circular terraces cut into a wooded slope, usually five to ten metres across, where the stack was built and burned under turf. They are common in Powys woods and almost invisible unless you know the shape.

Tanbark was the other. Oak bark contains tannin, and the leather trade needed it in quantity. Bark was stripped in spring when the sap rose, which is why oak coppice was cut in May and June rather than in winter. The bark was often worth more than the wood.

Both trades collapsed in the nineteenth century — coke replaced charcoal, chemical tanning replaced bark — and the coppices stopped being cut. What you see now is generally overgrown coppice: stems that should have been harvested seventy years ago and have grown into crowded thin trees.

Wood pasture

The other tradition, and quite different. Widely spaced old trees with grazing underneath, often pollarded — cut above browsing height so that stock could not reach the regrowth.

Pollards have a characteristic shape: a thick short trunk with multiple heavy limbs springing from one point. A field with a scatter of enormous old pollards is not a wood that has been thinned; it is wood pasture, and it is a habitat of high conservation value with a long history.

Reading a wood

Boundary banks. An old wood is usually enclosed by a bank and ditch, sometimes substantial, to keep stock out of the coppice regrowth. If a bank runs through the middle of a wood, the wood has grown over an older boundary.

Indicator plants. Bluebell, dog's mercury, wood anemone, wood sorrel, ramsons. None proves ancient woodland alone, but a rich assemblage strongly suggests continuity, because these species spread very slowly.

Shape. Ancient woods tend to have irregular, sinuous boundaries following the ground. Straight-edged blocks are plantation, and in Powys that usually means twentieth century.

Names. Coed, gwig, allt, cwm coed, and English hay, hurst, grove. Field names on the tithe apportionment frequently record woods that have since gone.

Where to see it

The Wye and Usk valley oakwoods, the Elan and Vyrnwy estates, and the steep-sided cwm woodland throughout the county — steep ground is where woods survived, because it could not be ploughed.

The RSPB reserve at Lake Vyrnwy holds substantial upland sessile oak. Gilfach in the Marteg valley has woodland as part of a whole working hill farm.