Ok
Bear with me..............it’s not easy to explain in writing!!
People are under this misconception that by laying the brash over stools will deter deer. I would like to know how that happens as deer aren’t genetically programmed to see brash as a threat to them. People seem to think that just because that has been done for x amount of years/generations/decades automatically believe that this is right and will not question it further.
You are partly right, deer do not like mess, they don’t like to walk through to much brash and they will avoid it if possible but were this augment falls down is in the simple fact that if deer are hungry enough they will walk through the brash and munch away. I can take you to woodlands where the estate policy is to burn everything in site, all the brash, all the waste. Not a scrap of wood left in the coupe. Then I will take you to an estate where we cut 30 acres of overstood hazel and if you have cut overstood hazel then you will know how much brash that produces and you will see that the policy in this area was to cover the whole woodland with the brash from the overstood. Believe me, nothing could walk through that, but, it has been annihilated by deer.
In the past their were people known as the ‘stickers’ and these people would walk through the woodland after the woodsman had finished and would pick up all of the material laying around on the woodland floor, it would be spotless, even woodlice found it difficult to find a home it was that clean, but we had some of the finest hazel stands and the deer had wonderful access to it but did not do the damage that everyone get carried away with now.
The only way to protect your stools is simply done by reducing the deer population within your woodland, there is nothing more scientific to it then that!
The angle of the cut is another one of those mis understood techniques.
We hear people say that you:
1..Only cut up and not down when you are coppicing by hand.
2.All the slants have got to be facing outside of the stool.
3.The angle sheds the water.
4.It stops the stool from rotting.
We will take each point in turn but bear in mind that most of this is visual.
1. Have you ever tried to coppice an acre with this method. Hurdle makers of old used to cut down as this is the easiest method and it doesn’t then split your rod. This method is fine on young hazel but forget it on the older rods.
2. This is the natural pattern that forms anyway, if you are cutting by hand or with a chainsaw, again people have forgotten to stop and look and study their subject.
3. yes it does but that doesn’t mean anything. Rain floods the stool, it isn’t subjective, it doesn’t arrive to a coppice stools after falling 20,000 feet and then decide not rain into the middle of the stool just because the hazel is cut at a slant. The whole stool get wet like everything else.
Where people get confused with the slant business is by the fact that they haven’t realised that by it’s very nature, you will leave a 45 degree angle on a stool after you have swung a billhook, try it and you will see that it is impossible to do any other way. Even with chainsaw, you will quite often see an angle of about 45 degrees.
4. No. The stool will naturally rot back to the nearest epicormic bud. This is the whole essence of coppicing. If it wasn’t for this amazing ability that the broadleaves have, we wouldn’t have coppicing. Regrowth is stimulated by hormones and not surface area and these hormones are released when the tree is under attacked, it reassures it’s survival. The lower you cut the stool the more regrowth you will get simply because you have a higher number of epicormic at the bottom of the stool.
or is there more to it that. I think there must be 
like how far off the ground or away from the original trunk should the cut be.
