A day in the life of a forest school leader...
A Monday in March
I met with the Friends of Pollok Country Park work party in the bright sunshine to teach them a bit about how to coppice. Coppicing is a traditional way to manage woodlands in order to produce resources for building or specific use, and usually the children are busy playing during forest school sessions, so I asked the friends of Pollok to come and help.
The hazel coppice at the forest school site is an ever bountiful source of sticks for whittling and carving, but much of it has grown too big to manage long term. The idea of coppicing is to cut back the trees on a rotation so that wood and resources of different sizes is available at any one time.
We cut a handful of hazel stools back to stump, as close to the ground as possible, and with the sticks and brash we’d gathered, we built deer protection fences around the stumps.
We wove a simple round nest shape, and also a sturdy square shape to make up the fences.
The highland cows are in calf right now and a mother came up to where we were working for a scratch on the gate post.
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