Hatfield Forest Coppicing Volunteers-how it all started.
In 1975 a local naturalist and entomologist, Geoffrey Sell, had noticed the decline and dereliction of the forest coppices since the property had been given to the National Trust in 1940. He particularly noted the decline in the butterfly population. I think it must have been about this time that he attended a lecture by Oliver Rackham, author of various books on Woods, woodland and the English countryside and was inspired by Rackham, who had started re-coppicing Hayley Wood in Cambs, which Geoffrey almost certainly visited. On the basis of this, he considered getting together a local group to restart coppicing in Hatfield Forest. Here is a version of the advert that he put in the local free press and he was rewarded with a significant number of interested people. He approached what was then the Management Committee, whose first reaction was to ask "Can it be done with hand saws?". The agreement that Geoffrey finally struck was that the Trust lend a chainsaw, we will supply