Designers & makers of oak framed buildings and decorative ARCHITECTURAL features

The advantages of green oak framing as a method of construction still hold
good today. Although oak is more expensive than softwood, it has an attractive figure, and the natural durability of the heartwood allows for exterior use.

It is now generally accepted that timber is a good choice as a construction
material on environmental grounds, being the only renewable structural
material, and having a low embodied energy. 

The gradual rise in concern for environmental issues has also favoured green
oak, which locks up carbon, has a low embodied energy, requires no preser-
vative treatment and can be sourced from sustainably-grown forests. Today
the oak frame is an accepted building form, capable of being weather-
proofed and insulated in accordance with present-day regulations, while at
the same time providing a link to the buildings of the past.

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The growth cycle of the indigenous broad-leaf trees of Northern Europe is such that once the root stock has become established, if the tree is felled, it will rapidly regenerate growth above ground, sending up a series of shoots, known as ‘spring’, as opposed to the original single stem. It is known that some root stocks have lasted for 1000 years, regularly being cut and re-growing thus providing a continuous renewable crop of wood. This process of management is known as coppicing. The expertise lay in selecting which shoots should be allowed to grow-on to produce usable timber for construction (Standards) and which could be allowed to grow for a limited period to provide fuel and other woodland products. Medieval carpenters were supplied with timber from a commercially managed woodland economy that was already ancient. 

Many of the sophisticated planning and building techniques which the Romans introduced to England were abandoned rapidly after their departure in 410 AD. The Saxons, who gradually displaced the Britons to the western extremities of England and Wales after the Romans left, were timber builders rather than masons.

There is little evidence of a significant change in either the structural or jointing carpentry techniques immediately following the Norman conquest. One of the main reasons we are only allowed glimpses of the sophistication of the craft of carpentry pre 1200 is that builders retained the archaic means of fixing and stabilising their timber structures by sinking the posts into the ground or a continuous series of logs into a trench. While these ‘earth-fast’ systems provided a stable structure, it was at the cost of their longevity. 

Historians and tree experts estimate that the  seafaring vessels uses at least 1.2 million of the best oak trees Britain and Europe could harvest in their manufacture.

Shipbuilders laid the keel of Nelson’s own HMS Victory, arguably the most famous warship ever to sail the seas, in July 1759 at the RN’s Chatham Dockyard on the River Medway in Kent. It took a year to come up with a name that, some say, commemorated Britain’s victory over the French in Quebec that September.

It’s estimated it took 6,000 trees to build the ship. Ninety per cent of it was oak, some of the timbers more than half-a-metre thick. Britain and Ireland was an oak grove and that oak grove fuelled the success of the British empire. 

  dru-wid- "strong seer," from Old Celtic *derwos "true" (from PIE root *deru- "tree," especially oak) + *wid- "to know" (from PIE root *weid- "to see"). Hence, literally, perhaps, 

                                                             "they who know the oak".