Touch wood - it's all going very well

Out in the remote woods of south Shropshire, Larry Jones is in his natural habitat.

The 43-year-old former factory worker who did all his growing up in the wild woods around Telford has gone back to nature to ply an ancient trade.

With the precision of a surgeon in a butcher's shop, he whips out a 200-year-old bill-hook knife from a sheath at his knee and hacks the branch of a hazel tree, saying: "They call me the Wrekin Woodsman - or as some of my friends say, the smelly Wrekin Woodsman."

Amid the rollercoaster of industrialisation of the last 200 years, the traditional art of coppicing and woodland management has been all but forgotten, yet prior to this we were a wood-based society; man would heap love and affection upon his trees, nurturing them over many decades before taking his axe to them to create a wood in which flora and fauna would grow to sustain man's needs.

Says Larry: "It's only in the last 200 years that we have not been a wood-based society - our homes were made of timber frames and the wattle for wattle and daub comes from the woodland.

"It's always been there, but people have been taken away from the woodland, not having anything to do with it."

From the earliest times most woodland was managed as "coppice with standards", as this was the most effective use of woodland to provide the range of products man needed - from shelter to firewood.

Coppicing itself is a "cut and come again" technique which involves cutting native broadleaved hardwoods down to ground level and then harvesting the multiple straight stems regenerating from the stump or stool. It is a rotational system of cultivation in which woodcutters such as Larry fell each small area of woodland - or coupe - every few years.

But coppicing and woodland management today is a revitalised "industry", and it is Larry's job - although he admits it's one that doesn't always pay much and he supplements his income with teaching - to develop sustainable woodland management, promote local diversity by using only trees of local provenance and manage the land in an ecological and traditional way.

And all this in what is chiefly the Telford area - not an area traditionally viewed as being rich in woodland. But rich it is, and Larry has his own wood near The Wrekin as well as plantations right in the heart of the conurbation, namely The Rock, which is more readily thought of as a housing estate.

Successful wood management means harnessing the will of Mother Nature. It involves knowing how woods grow from the ground up - from the lower level "understory" in the shadow of standard trees, right up to the canopy created by the tallest of oak trees.

It's all a finely balanced eco-system that brings out the best in Mother Nature. The job might mean re-planting of trees of local provenance and, should existing ones grow too close together and threaten to stifle other flora and fauna in the wood, chop them down.

"Mother Nature abhors a void - and she will fill it with everything, but is has to be managed," says Larry as he goes about his work.

In all this activity, no wood is wasted. Timber harvested from standard trees such as an oak might be sold to make a carbon-neutral conservatory, he says.

Other timbers are bought by the craft trade, for instance to make knife handles or small toys. Some is used as firewood and for charcoaling.

Other wood products include arbours, baskets, besoms, chestnut palings, gazebos and yurts. And Larry is proud of the fact that timber from his ash are used to build the famous Ironbridge coracles.

He says: "Ash might be sold for furniture making and for coracle making. We supply laths for coracle making."

And of course wood is used for log burning, with Shropshire recently being cited as one of Britain's log-burning capitals. In all, it's a line of work which ticks all the boxes for modern living: sustainable, ecologically and environmentally friendly, carbon neutral and locally-sourced.

Working for himself under his own name, for the past couple of years he has been managing the privately-owned Edge Wood near Westhope, south Shropshire.

Larry is nothing if not passionate about his work and thanks to the TLC he gives to his trees his timber is recognised as some of the best in Britain. But it's all relatively small scale and he works within a 25-mile radius of his Coalbrookdale base to cut down on timber miles, joking that "drinking in local pubs brings in 30 per cent of my business".

Making a way of life from the woods is all a far cry from his early industrial working career. Twenty years ago he was working in a factory making welding wire "dressed in the type of suit they used in nuclear warfare" and dipping metal into hydrochloric acid ("very environmentally friendly" he says with not a touch of irony).

For Larry, working in the woods is something of a return to his childhood. Brought up in Woodside, Telford, he would disappear with mates into Madeley Court woods.

"We had the wood and we loved it, and as far as we were concerned the woods were ours," he says.

So when one day a JCB turned up, there was panic. Larry won't go into details about what happened next but let's just say that particular JCB did no work that day.

It turns out, however, that the JCB was on the scene to help with the management of the woodland - and his ignorance back then of how to best sustain woodland is still shared by many other people today.

He explains: "We have people who come across us while we are coppicing, raging: "You are raping our woodland'.

"People get the idea that you are coming in, taking wood and making a load of money. They say 'You are no better than a Viking'."

The truth is that, in the best traditions of ancient man, the Wrekin Woodsman is preserving the sustainability of one of nature's best creations - the British woodland.

Larry adds: "It is supporting my heritage and it is very positive.

"I love it. I would not do anything else. I couldn't do anything else."

l For more information about Larry Jones contact 07976 957 522.