One of my most powerful childhood memories is of picking spring flowers in the ‘primrose wood’. Later in the season it became the ‘bluebell wood’ and there are photographs of us as we staggered home with armfuls. It was an abandoned chestnut plantation on a south facing hill overlooking the Weald and as well as the primroses and bluebells, tucked into the tree boles were violets, anemones, wood sorrel and further on, a patch of dog’s mercury which our dog loved but which made her sick. We picked primroses there for our bridesmaids’ posies for my aunt’s April wedding and down the years, when it came to my sister’s wedding, because she was a spring baby, mum crystallised the violets and primroses for her cake.

The wood had been planted and coppiced for fencing, though I never knew it harvested and we never checked it for autumn nuts – it was a spring place and my recollections are of cold, bright, family days with the promise of summer.

Later I learnt about the fencing it was planted for – chestnut paling – those lovely, rustic, wired rolls of split wood. I learnt its etymology – mediaeval English from the old French, pales were the wooden uprights and to pale meant to encircle, hem, fence in. There was even a paler, a park officer charged with keeping the fences in good repair. Presumably Dublin’s Pale and thus ‘beyond the pale’ came from the same root.

When I began blacksmithing, determined to avoid fossil fuels I experimented with different local, sustainable charcoals. Until the industrial revolution and the discovery of coal, all iron had been forged on charcoal and in the way that different woods have different burning properties, so do charcoals. Alder, for example, makes lousy firewood as it’s so wet, but charcoaled, with all the moisture driven out, it’s porous and burns hot and fast making it ideal for fire welding. Hardwood charcoals are best, burning hotter and longer than softwoods, whose residual resins can make it spit, unpredictable and dangerous. Both oak and sweet chestnut are recommended for smithing and I found a good and reliable source of chestnut charcoal which is a great all-rounder, coppiced in Herefordshire by someone who was diversifying; it kept both me and the forge happy.

Once my kids were grown and I could travel, I would discover the chestnut blanketed hillsides of the Cevennes in southern France and the sharp, tangy scent of them would take me straight back to the familiarity of my Kentish childhood. Hundreds of years ago monks arrived in Lozere, bringing with them not the better-known marron or Spanish chestnut, but the smaller chataigne, also known as the bread-tree for its utility and versatility. Ideally suited to the terrain, it became the staple of the region, dried in the schist cledes or drying houses which you still see everywhere. Used sweet or savoury in the form of dried whole chestnuts, milled flour, puree, jam, alcohol and even these days, ice cream, the Cevennes never knew famine. Autumn still sees every village and hamlet celebrate their Fete de la Chataigne with feasting and revelry and the rich smell of roasting chestnuts hangs over the valleys. The local trick is to roast them, wrap them in a cloth and then sit on this knobbly cushion – the weight helps separate the nut from its skin and children vie for the privilege!

I lived there amongst these trees for a while in my caravan with my forge, harvesting the nuts, (which I discovered went exceptionally well with bacon), heating my small space with the fallen dead wood and dreaming of making my own charcoal. As they ripened, the nuts would explode out of their spiky husks and there were times at night when I’d be startled awake by what I thought was someone at the door, but was in fact nuts thwacking the trailer roof or walls at speed. The fallen dried, brittle and spiny husks were hazardous though – a thistly carpet that you couldn’t walk barefoot on and a fall one day left me with a rash of tiny, poisonous splinters in my wrists; it took many painful months for them to work themselves out.

And now I’m moving into a small cottage in Radnorshire whose south facing garden slopes steeply down to the river, the bottom part of which is overgrown ash and hazel coppice, but the ash will have to go as disease has hit and is slowly killing them from the tips of their branches back. The land needs careful and sympathetic management and even though it may be too far north for them, I’m nostalgically tempted to replant with sweet chestnut with a view to coppicing and charcoal. I’ll give it a go and whether I succeed or fail, one thing’s for certain; whatever fencing I’ll need, it will be that lovely, rustic, wired chestnut paling.