Welcome to Courage Copse Creatives

Courage Copse Creatives is a small woodland enterprise based in the Taw Valley, North Devon run by owner/managers Katy and Vince.

We specialise in producing woodland products that are both sustainable and ethical, in particular our top quality barbecue charcoal and Pure bioChar. The majority of our products are made from or grown in our own woodland, Courage Copse. We use low impact management methods including timber extraction with horses.

As well as being producers of various products we also run and host courses and workshops for both children and adults.

We would primarily consider ourselves as ‘craftworkers’. Whether that is when we are engaged in the heritage craft of charcoal making or coppicing, or crafting a piece of furniture from our harvested timber or crafting an exciting educational workshop!

What makes Courage Copse Special?

Courage Copse is an Ancient Woodland Site. To be classified as such there has to have been continuous tree cover since 1600. At present the crop on the site is conifer plantation. (In 1880 the broadleaf was cut down and replaced with fast growing mixed conifer species. This was common practise.) From evidence on the ground and talking to the previous estate owner we can tell the woodland was hazel coppice with oak standards. It is our Mission Statement to return Courage Copse back to its natural state using native species, mostly harvested from the woodland itself.

Woodland Historian, Oliver Rackham makes a clear distinction between forestry and ‘woodmanship’. By his definition forestry is the planting and management of plantations, usually of one or two species. ‘Woodmanship’ on the other hand is the process of working with the naturally grown trees and managing them to ‘yield successive crops of produce in perpetual succession.’

So at Courage Copse Creatives as we restore the woodland back to its native state, bringing the neglected coppice back into rotation and gradually removing the conifer, we are moving the management from forestry to Woodmanship.