Pablo’s Woodlife

What I love about Bushcraft is the wide variety of knowledge and skills associated with it. There’s fire-lighting, cooking, shelter-building, tool-making, tool-using, traditional crafts, carving, aspects of survival skills and hunting/trapping to name just a few.

My particular interests at the moment are archery, tracking and observing wildlife, which for some reason I tend to keep separate from main-stream bushcraft skills. But there are other subjects on the periphery of Bushcraft which I also take an interest in.

Aspects like the weather fascinate me. My excursion posts usually start off with a record of what the weather was like and I try to interpret the weather maps and synoptic charts as best I can. I’m certainly no expert, but skills such as reading weather signs in the field can be handy on excursions as well as creating another interesting facet for study of the natural world.

Astronomy is another interesting subject which could be classed as relating to Bushcraft especially in a navigational sense at night. I’m not particularly good at identifying constellations or individual stars yet, but with the help of Stellarium (free) software, I think I’m improving.

Talking of navigation, this is another area of interest. American Bushman published a link to a site recently LandNavigation.org which offers great information on map reading and compass skills. I really don’t have occasion to use this skill too much, but I do like looking at and interpreting maps. Somehow I find them fascinating. I try to make my own sketch maps that really don’t make any sense to anyone except me! But it’s good fun doing it.

Horace Kephart enjoyed doing the same. He liked to study published maps but also made copious notes and maps of the areas he travelled. He created a key at the beginning of a notebook where each number represented where the specific map section was to be found. Like me, he used a quadrilled notebook and marked secret areas and hide outs which he marked on his maps calling them “masked camps.”

I love the phraseology he uses to describe one of these areas in “Camping and Woodcraft”:

“The camp is to be situated where not only men but cattle and wild hogs are unlikely to go. There should be nothing in the neigbourhood to attract to attract any of the various classes of people who frequent the woods. Study each of these classes of people in turn, and their habits.”

A man after my own heart.

Pablo

Poor Park and Park Wood are the names of the two local woods I frequent. No-one seem to know why the former is called “poor” park, although it might well have derived from someone’s name. Although the local village is more than likely named by the Vikings, the French may have given names to many other local features.

Like it or not, there are many French connections in the countryside and most stem from the Norman invasion. Locally we have a nearby Norman castle owned by Aubrey de Vere who was one of William the Conqueror’s most favoured knights. Therefore we would expect to have a substantial amount of land connected with it to be linked with the Normans. Local rumour has it that a later Normnan landowner was so short of money that he was called Simon ‘the Poor’ but I’m not too sure of that one.

The word ‘park’ also has connections with the Normans, for it was they who set up deer parks for local hunting purposes.  Thus you should expect any woods with the name ‘park’ in it to have some ancient connection with deer. There were 36 deer parks named in the Domesday book and these escalated to hundreds and hundreds in England before the English civil war decimated them.

Apparently it is still possible to recognise a medieval deer park even today by the egg-shape of the land and the earthworks used as the park boundaries.

Not only were parks developed by the Normans but so were forests. These were lands legally set aside for the hunting nobility. Forest Law inflicted severe punishments for anyone found interfering with the deer in the Forest. If you were caught ‘red-handed’ i.e. blood on your hands, you could expect only one form of punishment.

The oldest map of the two woods I can get on-line (visit www.visionofbritain.org.uk) is from 1856. I was hoping that it would show the two woods joined as one as they are not too far apart, but it doesn’t quite do that. Instead there’s another wood to the south east of Park Wood called  Hook Wood. No trace of Hook Wood exists now. Poor Park are the woods to the south. There is no mention of the name Poor Park on this map.

The next map is from 1925 and reveals that Hook Wood has disappeared. It does show the medieval Hawke’s Hall which has also now disappeared. I live just to the north of the now named Poor Park at Scot’s End, although there is now no such place as Scot’s End.

Park Wood has been significantly reduced in size and it is rarely named on maps. Interestingly, Poor Park (see the Sat Map at the top of the page) has not even changed its shape for over 150 years and is now one of the bigger woods in the area.

The council describes the woods as:

…[a] large ancient wood, originally comprising Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur), Ash (Fraxinus excelsior), Hazel (Corylus avellana) and Field Maple (Acer campestre), has now been widely replanted with Poplars (Populus sp.) and Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris). Despite storm damage and forestry activity, a typical woodland ground flora still survives.

I’m going to have to delve a little deeper and go back even further into the history of these woods.

Thanks for the visit.