The Age of Wood

Prologue: The Road to Nowhere PROLOGUE The Road to Nowhere
Many years ago, toward the end of an arduous walking tour of the French Pyrenees, my brother and I stumbled across an engineering feat that had helped change the course of human history and shape the modern world. As we made our way down from the peaks to the village of Etsaut, the route took us from alpine meadows to the conifer forests of the Vallée d'Aspe. The path, which had been broad and easy to follow, suddenly changed. As the river valley continued to drop, the path maintained its level, but only by cutting into the walls of an almost-sheer rock face. Soon we were walking along a narrow ledge perched precariously six hundred feet above the trees and foaming river in the Gorge d'Enfer below. The path continued like this for almost a mile before the gorge finally opened out, and we descended down to the level of the river and once again felt safe. Only then did a sign helpfully tell us that we had navigated the Chemin de la Mâture. Why had such a spectacular path been built in the middle of nowhere? And what was mâture?

The answer lies in the rivalry that developed in the eighteenth century between the two emerging superpowers of the Western world, France and Britain, and provides just one of the more striking examples of the way wood has helped shape the human story. With the two nations vying for power and influence over their developing colonies and territories in the Caribbean and North America, an arms race started as they built up their navies. Both nations strove to build bigger and more heavily armed ships of the line, capable of acting as firing platforms for up to a hundred huge cannons, which could batter other ships and shore defenses into submission. But both countries came up against the same problem; how could they access enough trees to build their ships? The problem was not the lack of wood itself. France in particular had large areas of forest, which covered around 30 percent of

Roland Ennos is a visiting professor of biological sciences at the University of Hull. He is the author of successful textbooks on plants, biomechanics, and statistics, and his popular book Trees, published by the Natural History Museum, is now in its third edition. He is also the author of The Age of Wood and The Science of Spin. He lives in England. 

"Ennos, a professor at the University of Hull in England and a specialist in the mechanical properties of trees, shares his insatiable curiosity with us. He applies his sharp eye for details, and he does so entertainingly." -Washington Post

"Ennos's special love and concern is for things made from trees...The principles of every significant technology, from tree-felling and carpentry to shipbuilding and papermaking, are described with a precise, almost mesmerizing detail." -New York Times Book Review