With summer coming up, what could be cooler than having a barbecue with your own home-made charcoal? Margery Jennings went on a charcoal-making course to learn how.

Rural Devon. 7.30 in the morning. The mist hangs low along the valley and I am distinctly in need of coffee. Ben isn’t. Ben is clearly a morning person. So is Anstey, his large shire horse.

We have come to learn the ancient craft of charcoal making We stand in the cobbled farm yard while Ben gives us a safety briefing. Anstey stands behind him her chin resting on his shoulder as he talks. I have the feeling she is assessing us – and has decided we are all a bunch of idiots.

Twinkle Toes

Next, equipped with hard hats, work boots and gloves, we head down to the woods.The woods is mostly birch, oak and hazel, which Ben has been restoring using traditional techniques. Anstey is an important part of the team. She may look big and heavy – and if she puts a hoof on your foot you certainly know about it – but compared with a tractor she is Twinkle Toes itself. Anstey can drag logs out of the woodland without damaging the delicate plants that grow under the trees.

Ben has already cut the wood we’re going to use to make the charcoal. The woodland has been neglected for years and the trees are crowding each other out. By careful thinning, cutting out weak straggly specimens, Ben gives the stronger trees more room to grow – and ends up with a lot of wood. It’s not good enough for timber but it’s great for making charcoal.

In a clearing stands the kiln. In the olden days, Ben explains, charcoal burners used to create a huge wood pile and pack it round with sods of earth to keep the air out. But this is incredibly time-consuming and a bit hit and miss – you only need a few cracks to appear in your clay for the whole “burn” to be ruined. So the modern method is to use a metal kiln.

Unhelpful horse

One person of jumps into the kiln to stack the wood. The rest of us ferry logs to and fro and pass them in. We take turns to stack, learning how to pack the wood so that the air is channelled evenly around logs during the burn. Carrying tonnes of timber to the kiln is heavy, hard work and Anstey is not helping out but by mid afternoon, we’re done. Then it’s time to put the kiln’s hat on. It takes all six of us to manoeuvre the massive metal lid into place.

And now for the burn!

Ben takes a long stick with a lighted brand at one end and thrusts in deep into the kiln. We all wait nervously. Will it light? Have we constructed the air channels properly? Slowly it get going.

Designated Smoking Area

Charcoal-making is not something to try if you live in town. The woodland is suddenly full of more smoke than you can imagine! The other members of the group vanish as it swirls around the clearing creating mysterious eddies and patterns. And then, after a while it clears.

With the hard work now over, we have to watch and wait. Ben explains that the whole burn can be ruined if too much air gets in too fast. The skill of the charcoal burner over the next 2 days is to control the flow of air so that the wood turns to charcoal not ash..

So for 2 days we sit and chat and we listen to bird song and occasionally run round like headless chickens blocking up the air vents when Ben notices that colour of the smoke has changed, meaning that the kiln is getting too hot.

Slowly the kiln burns itself out. We leave it to cool over night.

Black to black

Next the moment of truth. The opening of the kiln. At this point we could find several hundred kilos of charcoal – or just a pile of ash.

It is perfect. Beautiful black charcoal, still showing the patterns of the branches from which it came.

Yes, I did say black. Very, very black. And there is on only one way to get it out – shovel! When we went home we too were very, very black. But the next barbecue we had, on charcoal that I had made myself (with a little help from my friends) was the best I had ever had.

Ben May offers a range of woodland courses: as well as charcoal-making, you can learn how to work with a heavy horse; basket-making; rustic furniture-making; medieval woodland management and survival courses.