Re: Who owns all this anyway?


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Posted by Tom Napier on February 06, 2013 at 04:44:52 user Didymus.

In Reply to: Re: Who owns all this anyway? posted by Jon on February 05, 2013 at 15:49:20:

I don't think AR mentions it but the Billies were coppicing. That is, they were harvesting the outgrowths from the stumps left after most of the mature trees in the area had been cut down. After ten to twenty years these would have grown to some two inches in diameter and ten feet in length, idea for making charcoal.
If they returned to the same spot every 15 years or so they would have an inexhaustible supply of wood from land that was probably too steep to be worth clearing and farming. (See Wikipedia, Coppice, for more information.)
In their youth the Billies might have sold charcoal for local, small-scale iron-smelting (I picked up a piece of smelting slag on the shores of Lake Coniston in the mid-1960s.) but I don't know to whom they sold it in the 1930s. It might have been used for cooking.



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