Wooden Tops

Now that winter temperatures have hesitatingly descended upon our part of the world it’s important to have a reasonable amount of wood for us to burn in our cast-iron (ghisa) stufa or stove. I say hesitatingly because yesterday morning the car’s windscreen had iced up and today the temperature is over 15c. By Sunday it will again have dropped to below zero. At least, however, the hurricane winds we have recently been experiencing have lessened in force.

The easiest way to get wood, of course, is to phone up the local timber merchant who will deliver the goods at easy reach of one’s wood-hut. When we lived at Longoio the delivery was dumped on the road outside and we had to quickly clear the driveway to stack the logs against the inner wall of our garden. This operation usually took more than a day and was somewhat exhausting as we had to use a wheelbarrow up a slope to transport our fuel.

At our new abode it’s a lot easier. We have our own private driveway and have even built our own timber shed.

Why then haven’t we yet ordered our winter supplies? For two reasons. First we still have a lot of wood left over from last year especially since that winter wasn’t particularly harsh. Second, we are surrounded by woods and they are our own woods. Many of the trees have been felled by the electricity board when they were maintaining their high voltage lines and found that these were being interfered with by high branches. Some other trees, mainly that infestatory species of acacia with blood-letting thorns, which grows like a many-headed hydra, have been cut down by my trusty battery-powered electric chain saw.

I also have a petrol-powered example but, dissuaded by nightmarish tales of what these can do, have rarely used it. The thought of parts of my body being mixed up with bits of trees is too much to handle! The electric saw is perfect for small acacias, can be used as a very useful pruning tool and also for cutting fallen branches into a size suitable for feeding into that stufa.

In this way I’ve built up a series of woodpiles in part of the woods above us on what we call terrace two.

The challenge is how to transport these piles of logs to the timber shed below. Take them down in a rucksack? Use a trolley? Or put them bags?
My system so far had been to simply roll the logs down the steep slope that separates terrace two from terrace one.

What are these terraces anyway? In an age where most hill slopes in our valley were once cultivated, and where barley and spelt fields spread over large distances as subsistence crops, terraces were clearly defined. After the last war, with the drift of local populations to work in the factories of Italy’s ‘miracolo’ – the economic miracle which created the country’s modern industrial revolution, terraces were increasingly abandoned with trees and shrubs taking over.

In the case of our house we have delineated five terraces which we labelled as follows.

Minus one: below our house between the cellars and the road.