I can pick my fruit from an apple/ Like an inn,/Or can fill my fist where hazels/ Shut me in. This is from The Hermit's Song in Frank O'Connor's lovely book Kings, Lords & Commons. Lucky you if you have a hazel from which you can pick a fistfull, too. Hazels are rare enough in parts of the country, and anyway the grey squirrels often get there first, even to spoiling things by picking them before they ripen. Eileen McCracken tells us that "Hazel was once widespread to a degree that is hard to imagine today. .. . A pollen analysis made at Littleton bog, near Thurles in Tipperary showed that until just before the end of the seventeenth century, hazel pollen formed 30 to 40 per cent of all pollen grains, but after 1700 it formed less than 5 per cent." Elsewhere she sums up: "The end of the 18th century, too, saw the passing of the old landscape for ever." A remarkable use for hazel was in coopering. "Casks were hooped with either hazel or osier (willow) and after 1698 each cask for provisions had to be bound with twelve hoops (increased to sixteen for herring barrels in 1733.)" The book is The Irish Woods Since Tudor Times, 1971.
There is nothing very distinguished about the appearance of the hazel or coll. Charles Nelson defines it as "Deciduous tree or, most usually, a bushy shrub to 6 metres tall," but it has played a big part in history and literature. Hazel nut remains were found in Mesolithic houses which were excavated at Mount Sandel near Coleraine, a settlement first occupied about 9,000 years ago. Nelson reassures us that in certain areas hazel is abundant in scrub and woodland that develops on alkaline soils. "There are several superb wildwoods of hazel and ash in The Burren, County Clare." Hazel, he reminds us, is the tree of knowledge in Irish tradition and under the Laws of Neighbourhood, was granted the highest rank as a Nobel of the Wood, because of its nuts and staves. Certainly, in the distant and not-so-distant past, a fruit that would last all through winter was a good source of nourishment. (And they had no grey squirrels then, to tear away at the fruit. They possibly had the red.)
Not the handsomest tree or shrub, but to be cherished. Those ten or twelve feet long staves. You remember Yeats cutting and peeling a hazel wand, threading a berry and "caught a little silver trout." Y
*Trees of Ireland by E. Charles Nelson and Wendy F. Walsh (Lilliput).