Chestnut: A Material Shaped by Woodland, Craft, and Time

Read time: 4 minutes

Sweet chestnut has long been embedded in the British landscape. Managed, cut, split, and reused for centuries, it is a material whose durability comes not from chemical treatments or industrial processes, but from biology, tradition, and skill. Today, as designers and builders look again to low‑impact and locally sourced materials, chestnut offers a compelling case for how historic practices can remain relevant in contemporary landscapes.

From Coppice to Construction

The story of chestnut begins in managed woodland. Sweet chestnut is traditionally grown through coppicing, a form of woodland management in which trees are cut back regularly to ground level. This encourages multiple straight stems to regrow from the stool, producing reliable lengths of timber on predictable cycles.

Coppicing is not only productive but regenerative. It extends the life of the woodland, supports biodiversity, and creates a repeating supply of usable material without felling mature trees. In the case of chestnut, this system has allowed the same woodlands to be worked continuously for hundreds of years.

The resulting timber is well suited to outdoor use. High levels of natural tannin make chestnut resistant to rot and insect attack, allowing it to perform exceptionally well in contact with soil and moisture—often without the need for additional treatment.

A Naturally Durable Material

Chestnut’s durability is one of its defining characteristics. Unlike softwoods that rely on pressure‑treated preservatives, chestnut achieves longevity through its internal structure. When split rather than sawn, the grain remains intact, helping the timber shed water rather than absorb it.

This makes chestnut particularly suitable for external applications such as:

  • Post and rail fencing
  • Cleft paling fences
  • Gates and structures
  • Outdoor furniture
  • Shingles and shakes

These uses are not new. They are rooted in rural building traditions that prioritised materials capable of weathering decades of exposure without maintenance or replacement.

Working with the Grain

Much of chestnut’s performance depends on how it is worked. Traditional cleaving techniques follow the natural grain of the wood, producing stronger, more stable components than those cut across it. This approach also minimises waste and energy use, requiring few tools and little processing.

Olly Moses, a coppice worker and maker, joins us to share insight into this working relationship between material and maker. His practice spans the full journey of sweet chestnut—from woodland management through to finished structures—illustrating how knowledge passed down through generations remains essential to the material’s success.

Where is chestnut harvested?

It’s really a Mediterranean tree. It’s sometimes known as Spanish chestnut, but I’d say the heartland is from northern Italy. And going around the Limousine in France as well. It’s around Bordeaux, interestingly, because the wine industry use it for making barrel hoops. That’s a really short rotation.

In the UK it likes the southern climate more and it was planted traditionally in the south. There’s a bit of southeast and there’s a bit planted around Hereford as well, on the east. And there’s a big company, Say It With Wood, based near Hereford and they cut a lot in Kent and Hereford as well. And Suffolk and Essex coppices were planted in the early 20th century – quite a bit later than most of the estates in Kent and Sussex were planted theirs. The industry hasn’t really taken off in Essex and Suffolk like it has in Kent and Sussex, fencing-wise.

Was it planted originally for the charcoal?

Yeah, but there was a lot of hornbeam coppice in Kent and Sussex, where you now get chestnut coppice planted. Most of it would have been originally hornbeam for charcoal, I think. And then they found that the chestnut poles were better for hop poles. So I don’t know if the chestnut went back as far as the Tudor ironworks. There was a lot of hornbeam, and there used to be a lot more hornbeam coppice than there is now.

So with these things, the global warming issue is likely to make it something that could potentially take hold further north?

It loves hot summers. Two summers ago, when I was cutting my own chestnut in Sussex, it was record regrowth, I think, and some of the old boys that were there, they’d never seen it grow that much in a year. And as global warming happens, it’s probably just going to get happier and happier in the south.

What got you interested in working with chestnut?

I did an apprenticeship with Ben Laws in 2020. Before that, I had no idea about chestnut at all. I was amazed by the principle of coppice. I couldn’t believe that you just kept cutting and stuff kept growing. 

Was it about the aesthetics of chestnut, or the qualities of the material?

Yeah, both. I mean, I think that the stuff you made from it is incredibly useful in that you can make really good building products; you can make plastering rods and shingles and stuff, which is really durable, and the properties of the material lend themselves to the finished product so well. And then those things are also really aesthetically beautiful. So it’s a combination of the aesthetics of it and just the sheer practicality and all the great properties it had.

If you’re thinking about the gardening industry, what kind of materials that are being used at the moment do you feel chestnut could
replace? And what would you say the main advantages are in using it over the existing materials?

Sawn chestnut is massively under used at the moment. Saw mills don’t take chestnut because they think it is too splitty, and it’s not worth their while, because they’re going to get too much loss from board splitting. And for stuff like sleepers, they should really be doing a lot more (although I don’t really want people to do too many because I struggled to get enough big chestnut!)

Sawn gate posts as well. You pay a fortune for an 8×8 oak gate post, and it’s really heavy to handle for the person installing it. And chestnut should be cheaper, lighter and as durable.

And there’s all the treated timber you see in gardens as well. Again you should be using naturally durable timber and chestnut is the obvious one.

When you’re working with chestnut is there anything you can kind of identify that helps you get the best out of the material?

Well, it’s just the way because it is very, it likes to split, it splits very readily. That’s obviously makes working with it very easy if you want a cleft product like a cleft or split fence post. But if you’re doing more fine carpentry stuff or you’re chiselling mortises into the bit of timber, you’ve just got to go a little bit more carefully with your chiselling, especially with the grain. You don’t want to bang a chisel in really hard with the grain, because it could pop the thing open a lot easier than it would do with a bit of oak or a bit of soft wood. So it’s just being a little bit more careful and worried about it splitting. You can’t bash it around too much. Because it’s not as strong as oak.

Is there anything that when someone’s approaching a supplier or a carpenter, is there anything they should be looking for in terms of
the qualities of that chestnut?

I mean, like any hardwood, the quicker grown it is, the stronger it’s going to be. And if it’s really slow-grown, it will be that much more brittle for certain things. So if you’re making plastering lards, I look for material that’s quick-grown, because with the slow-grown stuff, you try and bend the lath a bit with your throw, to guide the split, and it’ll just snap on you. Your higher quality hardwood timber is going to be faster-grown, which you should get in a coppice system. That is the aim of the game. For stuff to shoot up quickly and compete with each other for the light and grow nice and straight.

If you’re grading timber, I’d be grading out knotty, slower-grown stuff for chunky things like sleepers and gate posts. Finer high end timber can be used for cabinetry.

And is there anything that bugs you if it’s not done right?

I’m sure being from down south, you must know chestnut post and rail fencing. And usually down there, people do it right, they put the cleft side up in the fence on the rails. However you get the point facing up around here (Cambridgeshire) for some reason, because there’s a novelty, and people don’t really know what they’re doing with it. A lot of landscapers will install it themselves. They always put the bark side up and that annoys me. The chestnut post and rail should be installed cleft side up. It’s the durable part of the wood. The bark is where the sap wood is: it’s less durable. And it just looks better when it points up. But it’s something you definitely see much more in Suffolk and Essex and Cambridge here, where post and rail is not as well established.

I also like to see stuff done with good joinery and not too many screws.

How about costs?

So chestnut is a lot cheaper than say oak. If you’re buying chestnut log in the round, it’s going to be a half to three times cheaper. I think oak is about three times more expensive than chestnut in the round. 

How about timeframes?

It’s quite a slow dry product. If you’re making any cleft products, the idea is to let it sit for a little bit before, and it does split its best after maybe a couple of months, but you can split it straight away. And actually, sawn chestnut doesn’t warp nearly as much as oak, and it’s less than larch as well, it’s quite warpy. So I said, yeah, oak and larch are probably the main competitor species with chestnut. I suppose you could put a robinia in that as well, because people do use that. Most robinia in this country we get comes from Eastern Europe.

Are there any other real outliers you feel like maybe underrepresented at the moment and could really benefit clients or designers in
incorporating them?

Absolutely. There are not that many people out there making chestnut gates. I think gates always have an afterthought, so I’ll plug my gates. Rich Ely makes lovely gates as well. If there’s something that can be made out of wood in a garden, I think you’d be mad not to seriously consider chestnut. And I’m using the round wood is a real plus because of the aesthetic quality that it brings and you see the shape of the tree and its structure. You can argue from an environmental point of view, that it’s undergone fewer processes to get it to the stages that hasn’t been taken to the mill and sawn and then brought off the shelf.

And are there any kind of creative or contemporary uses that you can think of?

Yeah, I think I’m going to plug my woven lath fencing. The lath is for plasterers, but it makes a beautiful woven texture when you weave it into fences. You can do it in panels, as I do it, or there’s another chap in Suffolk who does continuous weave. I don’t know if you’ve seen the willow fences. It’s very popular with garden designers, but the problem is, willow just has no durability at all, and will last you 10 years if you’re lucky. But chestnut will far outdo that. Especially because the lath is really split from the very heart of the tree, and it shouldn’t have any sap wood on it – that will last a very long time.

I think woven fencing could be done a lot more, and actually sawing the saw and lath as well is a really good way to do it quickly and more cost-effectively. People with saw mills can pump those things out. It’s a very quick way to do a big woven screen, and because the shape of the saw and lath is so regular, it doesn’t look quite crisp and contemporary as well, which is an aesthetic that people want to. So not reason you can’t do that with chestnut: it doesn’t have to be all kind of hobbity and higgledy-piggledy.

What about sustainability or environmental properties?

Yeah, I think maybe the fact that it maintains healthy habitats from biodiversity point of view. And there’s a carbon sequestration argument with building with timber. I’d say helping biodiversity and creating forests with different age structures, which is what well managed coppices should be doing. But a lot, actually a lot of the coppicing in the southeast, they just work across the whole wood in the swathes and everything ends up pretty much the same age, which is a bit annoying when you see that. But that’s more the people, the land agents and the estates that manage the wood just don’t think about mixing up the age structure very much. But that’s what it should be, that mixed age structure means that different creatures can thrive in different parts of the wood.