Last and certainly not least I have to mention the charcoal burners. Nowadays we think of charcoal as barbeque fuel but it has a lot more uses than that, still being used industrially for many forms of filters. For thousands of years the coppices were used to provide charcoal for fuelling the Wealden furnaces and forges. Each furnace would have used the output from around 2500 acres of coppice and as charcoal did not travel well on the poor Sussex roads it would have come from the woods surrounding each forge and furnace.
Chris and Lucy make their charcoal near Didling Woods near Midhurst, and if you are in the area you will see it available as Didling Good charcoal. Or you can find them on their Charcoalburners website. As Chris had to take his mum to hospital on the Sunday, this year they were unable to burn at the show.
Lucy had a great display showing the different types and grades of charcoal they produce and their uses. They mainly burn Alder wood which is renowned for making good charcoal, easy to light, burns well and hot making it good for cooking (as does my birch charcoal of course!)
They also had artists charcoal and fines for sale. Horticultural fines are smaller pieces of charcoal which are sieved out when producing lumpwood for cooking. The fines are increasingly popular with gardeners as they are used as a soil sweetener and add moisture retaining ability to compost and soil. As they are a totally inert form of carbon and will not breakdown in the soil the fines can also be regarded as a carbon sink locking away carbon in your soil.
Chris and Lucy are also busy this year as they are building their own house in the woods where they have been living and burning charcoal for some time. The cruck framed wooden house is being built to the design of their friend Ben Law, a local coppicer and green woodworker of some fame following his programmes on grand designs.
Chris is making the shingles for the house himself from Western Red Cedar, not a traditional material for shingles in the Weald though it's very popular for shingles in North America. The shingles are sawn on Chris' bandsaw rather than being cleft and they look excellent, the waste is charcoaled and to my surprise it seems that Western Red Cedar produces quite good charcoal, though light and quick burning in comparison to the traditional hardwood charcoals.
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