It turns out that the place Jane and I went this afternoon to exchange a bit of work for a haul of logs, is known as The Whispering Knights Project. It is situated next to some neolithic monuments in the Rollrights area of North Oxfordshire, just above Chipping Norton. A relatively young woodland (planted about 20 years ago) is being developed to encourage biodiversity and to reflect respect for those who lived on the land before us. On their website, you can find out more and see a video with some drone footage letting you seem some of the sculptures being formed from cut wood from the air.

We were last there a couple of years ago and it has definitely developed quite a lot since then. Our job this afternoon was to spend an hour or two working through a pile of cuttings to grade them into different sizes and levels of flexibility, from long bendable whips – wondrous ash wood – to shorter and more fragile pieces that can be piled inside new structures.

With the boot-full of logs we returned with, our back garden is now at peak wood although, with some very cold weather expected, we are glad of that. I think we will be making some space soon for newly arrived sticks and logs to start making their slow procession round the garden through various stages of processing so that, by the time we come to burn them, they should be well seasoned and properly dry.