Notes from the Wood Chop Challenge 2026
I arrive at Hazel Hill having been dropped at the road by a taxi. As I pass under the canopy of the wood, still bare from winter, I can see bright stars shining through the branches. It’s a clear night — a good sign for the day ahead.
We are gathering for Hazel Hill Wood’s annual Wood Chop Challenge.
At Hazel Hill the firewood is both product and practice.
This moment has become an important marker in our calendar because it unlocks an essential ingredient in our retreats: firewood.
Our off-grid buildings rely largely on wood-burning stoves and biomass boilers for heat. Hazel Hill Wood is a place where people come to stay in the woodland and deepen their connection with the living world. At the heart of that experience is a welcoming hearth — somewhere warm and dry to gather after a day outside.
That warmth begins with wood.
Our dependence on firewood is a reminder of our wider dependence on the living world. At Hazel Hill this connection is very visible.
Trees are felled.
Logs are cut and split.
Wood is stacked and seasoned.
Seasoned logs are transported to storage bays.
Finally, the right-sized logs are stacked beside each stove, ready to burn.
We often talk about firewood as something the wood “produces”. But at Hazel Hill the wood is not only the end product — the process is part of the purpose too.
For some people, the highlight of their time here is joining the wood processing: shifting timber, splitting logs, stacking the piles that will heat the buildings months later. The firewood is both means and end. It warms the hearths, but the work of making it also warms the community. In that sense the wood pile is not just a fuel store — it is a visible trace of shared effort.
We try to keep each stage of this process visible at Hazel Hill. It reminds us that this is a working woodland, as well as a place for conversation and retreat.
People across the Hazel Hill community play a role in this supply chain — from regular volunteers to visitors staying here for the first time.
Wood
For a place dedicated to caring for woodland, people are sometimes surprised by how much tree felling happens here.
But this work is deliberate. It forms part of our forestry management plan.
Hazel Hill was once a plantation. Our long-term aim is to return it to a more natural woodland with a diverse range of species and ages. Some areas currently contain trees of the same age growing close together. By selectively thinning the smaller or weaker trees, we allow the stronger ones to grow larger and healthier.
In this way, humans are making a positive intervention in the woodland — meeting our need for firewood while improving the ecosystem. In many ways, this is what regenerative practice looks like.
For this year’s Wood Chop Challenge, most of the felling was carried out by forestry trainees from Sparsholt College, under the guidance of Jason Turner, a long-time friend of the wood. It’s a win-win relationship: the trainees gain a valuable training environment, and the woodland benefits from careful management.
Chop
The chopping stage is the most labour-intensive part of the process.
Our Conservation Lead, Charley Miller, does an extraordinary job coordinating what is actually quite a complex sequence: chainsawing, carting, splitting, more carting, stacking — not to mention gathering, sorting and bundling kindling.
All of this is made possible by more than thirty brilliant volunteers who joined us last night and this morning to get stuck into this hungry work in the glorious spring sunshine.
Challenge
Until recently, Hazel Hill Trust was still buying firewood. Pretty extraordinary for a wood.
A number of factors led to that situation: the forestry licence had lapsed before Covid, the charity was growing quickly, buildings were expanding, and the capacity to manage woodland operations had shifted with changes in staff and trustees.
Over the past few years we have gradually rebuilt that capacity.
We now have our forestry licence again. We have developed a volunteer programme. We have built strong relationships and partnerships. And we have created the Wood Chop Challenge as a way of bringing all of this activity together.
Alongside this practical work, our community consultation in 2023 helped articulate the idea of the hearth as central to Hazel Hill — a place of warmth, gathering and connection.
The Wood Chop Challenge is one way we keep that hearth burning.
And like much of what happens at Hazel Hill, it only works because of relationships — between people, the woodland, and the many hands that help care for it.
The Wood Chop Challenge keeps the hearth burning — literally and socially. The firewood warms the buildings, but the work of making it warms the community.