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- As a business Whippletree has been established for over 20 years. Originally founded in 1989 to handle forestry contracting, it evolved almost organically, into the present specialist supplier of English oak, with over 75,000 cu. feet of quality timber in stock.
- From its start the founder’s traditional Cambridgeshire agricultural background ensured the Company did not confine itself to just harvesting trees, but to replanting them as well.
- Thousands of trees planted by Whippletree throughout the region testify to the application of responsible forestry practices.
- The Company has been in the vanguard of the ‘green revolution’ from the beginning.
Extensive experience of exacting projects
- Over the years Whippletree have been involved in many unusual and demanding projects.
- These have ranged from the provision of large curved and shaped beams, to steam bending and glue laminating, production of various shaped posts (turned, tapered, moulded etc.) and unusually long sections, to framing, plus matching to original items.
- We have the experience to tackle almost any exacting engineering task a historic building renovation scheme might throw up.
What is a Whippletree?
The Oxford English Dictionary records two meanings for a whippletree:
The first, now regarded as obsolete, is derived from the Middle Low German ‘wipelbom’, denoting a glossed ‘cornel - tree’ (Cornel wood was celebrated for its hardness and toughness). This also appears to have been a collective term for fruit trees, that Chaucer apparently in 1386 used to denote a type of cherry bearing small red fruits about the size of an olive.
The second and more common meaning links it to draught animals. Here it refers to a type of swingletree – a pivoted wooden crossbar to which two or more draught animals’ traces were attached, thus permitting freedom of movement for the draught animals’ shoulders.
In 1733 a wooden whippletree was recorded as being 2 foot 6 inches long.
To perform the function of a whippletree the wood requires considerable structural strength, yet should still have the capacity to be readily worked. Typically a whippletree was constructed from ash or oak.The whippletree illustrated above was made at the end of the nineteenth century and displays ash’s hardwearing characteristics.