Shaw Woodland
Shaw:- "a thicket, a small wood, a copse or grove; a strip of wood or underwood forming the border of a field". (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary)
Once one starts to look around the countryside there are many small patches of scrub, in field corners along the sides of steep banks etc. Some of these will be of recent origin such as along railway lines. Others on closer inspection show they are of more ancient origin, coppice stools and pollarded trees, diverse ground floras of typical ancient woodland plants such as Bluebells, Wood anemone, Dog Mercury. Small woodlands such as these, dating back at least to the 13th century, are among the oldest landscape features still found in the Kentish Weald. Locally they are called Shaws (sometimes Shave if narrow in shape) and typically they have been cut over regularly as coppice until recent times when markets for coppice products have declined.
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The Weald and Downland Museum has established a Shaw Coppice as part of a reconstructed medieval Farmstead, Bayleaf. This is coppice woodland with a diverse range of species that provides wood, fruit, leaves and other items all close to the house. To some extent the local grocer’s shop and DIY store rolled into one! The design of their Shaw is based on those still in existence on the Bore Place Estate, Chiddingstone, Kent. Old maps dating back to 1765 show a landscape of six acre fields with thick hedges and numerous shaws of 50 or so feet in width and 150 to 250feet in length.
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Photo of the Shaw Woodland at the Weald and Downland Museum
References
- Weald and Downland Museum (1990) The Bayleaf Medieval Farmstead, ISBN 0-905259-15-7
- Roberts, Geoffrey, (1999) Woodlands of Kent, ISBN 1-873953-31-3