hæsel bearu

Iain Robinson writes in praise of hazel, hedging, and dowsing.

Hazel is my totem tree.

            The hedgerows and woods were dominated by it in the Blackmore Vale, where I spent my early childhood, the landscape that Thomas Hardy described in Tess of the D’Urbervilles as ‘a broad rich mass of grass and trees’. Even the name of our village, Hazelbury Bryan, held within its etymology the importance of the coppice wood, the Old English hæsel and bearu, meaning a hazel grove or wood. Each morning, during the school term, I would walk unaccompanied along a winding lane to the school bus stop, trailing the tips of my outstretched fingers along the soft leaves of the hazel hedgerow as I went. The wait for the diesel rattle and the pale blue and cream livery of the antiquated British Leyland bus would often seem long and dull, frequently cold. I entertained myself with daydreams and observation. I watched the hedgerows, always alive with hidden birds, half-seen rustled movements, and sudden argumentative calls from sparrows and tits, blackbirds and thrushes, and learned the ways of the hazel. How the buds looked before leaf burst, all parcelled potential, then how the leaves unfurled themselves, all soft and pale into the spring sunlight. How the catkins left a fine green dust of pollen on your fingers. How the broad leaves, saw-toothed along the edges yet so soft to touch, could be folded into small envelopes, or torn like paper along the veins. How the same leaves darkened and toughened throughout the year. How the cobs grew green and weighed down the long thin poles of the trees as the squirrels busied with them. I watched the progress of spiders webbing the leaves. It was a slow accumulation of knowledge gained through observation. It was study born of boredom, that much underrated educator.

            Our house sat in an acre of land, a long strip bounded by hazel hedging, elm and oak trees. The hedgerows along the lanes, and most of the field edges, were flayed by tractor pulled hedge cutters, but my father, perhaps inspired by an episode of Out of Town, had ours layered in the traditional manner. The hedge worker, known as Old George, was said to have never travelled further than the nearest market town. He insisted on being paid in chewing tobacco and brandy. He lived at the bottom of a steep winding lane in a cottage with a much-patched corrugated iron roof, surrounded by a tumble of outbuildings. He dressed much as he must have done in his youth at the start of the century—a flat cap, flannel trousers, woollen cardigan, a three-button jacket. His thick Dorset dialect was one I could follow better than my parents. I was five or six years old, used to the accent from my school mates, whereas my parents were outsiders. I followed him everywhere, like a lost dog, getting in the way, being warned off sharp tools. He was, according to one of my parents’ letters, my unlikely friend.

I recall him working with his billhook and heavy leather mitten, cutting the hazel with quick, careful blows that spliced the stem diagonally but did not sever, then bending the long rods down to weave them into a thick basketwork barrier, which, my father explained, would grow up twice as strong and make room for birds to nest. Hazel is pliable, the supple wood of childhood bow making, and so easily yields to the skilled hands and vision of a hedger. Hedging is a kind of building. Instead of dry-stone walls, the vernacular field barrier of many parts of Britain, the hedge is a living, growing, organic barrier that once shaped, will change again, take on new life, tower upwards until it once more needs to be brought down to its roots.  Each cut stem, or pleacher, would be secured further with stakes, driven home with a wooden mallet, around which the complex hedge-work architecture took form. When the work was first done, the effect seemed brutal, the once tall hedge looked butchered, flattened and splintered along its length, smelling of cut greenwood, but as spring came and the sap rose, the green shoots of fresh hazel grew skyward.

            Hazel wasn’t the only species. Most of the hedges in the area were a mix of Hazel, Blackthorn, field maple, dog rose, and hawthorn. But Hazel and Blackthorn dominated, or so it seemed to me. In the autumn we’d pick the blackthorn’s fruit, sloe berries, from the hedgerows in the pastures, which were not flayed back as regularly as those on the roads. And in the spring, the white flowering blackthorn was used as an indicator of the end of winter, though always with a warning of the blackthorn winter, that last sting of frost in April when the blossom was already on the hedgerows.

Hazel Cobs - Photo by Iain Robinson

            Hedge laying was and remains a declining country skill, but one that is now recognised as being beneficial to wildlife, promoting biodiversity, extending the life of the trees and providing nesting sites for a huge variety insects, birds and mammals. If our predatory cat’s various kills were anything to go by, then our acre plot supported shrews, mice (I’d like to think this included the hazel dormouse), moles, rabbits, grass snakes and slow worms. Badgers were also a common sight, as were hedgehogs. In the summer months bats flitted at dusk along the tops of the hedges, picking off moths and midges. We had a feral cat make her home among the hazel stems where she raised, with partial success, a litter of kittens. ‘The State of Nature’ report published in 2019 indicated more than two-fifths the UK’s species had seen significant decline over the past decades. One hundred and thirty three species once common have vanished from these islands over the past 500 years. The first official red list for British mammals produced by the mammal society for Natural England in 2020, classified 11 of the 47 mammals native to Britain as being at imminent risk of extinction, with a further 5 near-threatened. More intensive farming, habitat destruction and fragmentation, the decline of traditional country skills, and climate change have all contributed to a growing crisis in biodiversity.

            Old George also made hurdles, barriers wove from hazel or willow. Wattle hurdles have been made since the Neolithic times, laid down as tracks ways in the Somerset levels, and then for walls in iron age and medieval houses, daubed with clay and straw, but also for gates and portable animal fencing, a use for which this old skill is still in demand. George probably used hazel coppiced from the woodlands that occupied an area north of the village, next to a settlement called Woodrow. These areas of woodland, Deadmoor Copse, and Brakethorne Copse, adjoined a pre-enclosure common, shown on OS maps as Deadmoor Common, but the area was simply known to us kids as Deadmoor Woods. Rackham explains how Dorset was once ‘intersected with a ramifying spider’s-web of commons’ that diminished after the enclosures of the eighteenth century, with surviving examples ‘cherished for their fens and old grassland’ the latter of which can still be found on Deadmoor common, providing a stronghold for near vanished butterflies, with Silver-washed Fritillaries, Hairstreaks, White Admirals and the Purple Emperor all reported as sighted in the area. When I was in primary school a trainee teacher, Miss Brown, took a small group of us through the woods on a nature trail one Sunday afternoon, some thirty odd years before forest schools became in vogue. It was, I think, the first time I had entered a proper woodland, not some manicured National Trust woodland ride, losing sight of its edges and moving deep into its inner spaces, following a path not well used, or trod mostly by deer. I don’t recall what she taught us, but it was most likely the obvious tree species, animal tracks, and bird song. I remember the green shadiness of the wood, the silence, or rather the gentle shifting of the trees and the soft crunching of wellies on leaf-mould and twig. In the holidays we played in the pastures that sloped down to the woods, where the dairy cows stood in the shade of the trees churning the clay soil into a battleground that hardened, with their patties, in the long summertime. We knew the headless horseman roamed the woods and the common. Woodlands were synonymous for us with superstition, with an unknown world that moved beyond the visible.

A hazel tree can self-coppice. . . if it is not cut or browsed it ‘sends up new shoots from the base that ultimately replace old ones’.

            Hazel has long associations with magic. This is partly related to its vigorous growth, exactly the reason why it’s used as a coppice tree. The term coppicing describes the act of cutting a tree so that it re-grows with multiple shoots. All broadleaved trees can be coppiced, but some trees like the hazel re-grow quickly and plentifully, so that a coppice woodland, or copse, can be divided into sections, and cut on a short rotation of less than 10 years. A hazel tree can self-coppice, so that, as Rackham explains in Woodlands, if it is not cut or browsed it ‘sends up new shoots from the base that ultimately replace old ones’. Coppicing the tree controls the process so that wood can be produced that has different uses depending on the size and age at which it is cut. Smaller stems might become pea sticks and slightly larger rods used for bean poles and walking sticks or split lengthways with a billhook for use in hurdle making. They can also be split to make the hazel spars used by thatchers to hold reed thatch in place. Bundles of less useful or straight stems can be tied into faggots, once a cheap fuel source for bread ovens, but also used for shoring up the banks of rivers and streams. Larger diameter hazel can be used for firewood, but traditionally might be burned by charcoal burners, the air and heat controlled to carbonise the wood, making lump charcoal. These days we know it as a barbeque fuel, or as a water filter, but charcoal burns much hotter than wood, and has been used since pre-history for smelting iron and other metals. The practice of charcoal burning had almost died out in Dorset by the 1970’s, but I possess a dim memory of being driven past the burners in the back of my parents Renault 16. It was somewhere in Dorset, and though I cannot recall where or when precisely, I have a clear picture in my mind of the smoke drifting from the ring kilns in the woodland clearing. Like many almost extinct woodland skills it has come back into vogue, with small woodland owners taking it up along with coppicing, but often more as a hobby than as a serious commercial enterprise.

            Water divining—or dowsing—might sound like a rather new age esoteric affectation, but it was my father, who was a rational man, a former air force officer, and by no means a hippy, who demonstrated it to me. The hazel needs to be sappy and cut where there is a fork. You hold it lightly by the two stems, with the fork and single stem away from you, and walk the ground you hope to survey. The fork will either twitch downward or bend upward when over the water source.   My dad and I walked up and down our garden, and every time we crossed the water pipes or septic tank, the hazel moved. There is no scientific explanation as to why this might work, but theories include electromagnetic variations in the ground being detected by either the dowser or the hazel fork, or a subconscious muscle response, though I prefer to believe that we still don’t fully understand the way trees respond to their environment, even when freshly cut. I remember the magic of it, our disbelief that it worked, the hazel stems straining against my palms, suddenly alive.