A decade ago Darryl and his partner, Jo, bought the 13-hectare Great Lindeth Wood, a rare, ancient coppiced woodland in Cumbria where they live off-grid. The land had been coppiced in the past but fallen to neglect. ‘There were a few reasons why I started out charcoal burning. It had been done here for an awfully long time, in this woods for hundreds of years and right across the valley. We wanted to carry that on and to make a living from the woods which gave us a good starting point. We already knew there was a market for barbecue charcoal so that started us off

‘Burning is kind of what you do if you own some woodland and want to try to make some money out of it. I went on a course to learn how to make barbecue charcoal and I really liked it’

‘This is an 8ft ring kiln, which is the old, rather traditional way of making barbecue charcoal. They are getting superseded by retorts, which are more efficient, making more charcoal from the same amount of wood. Retorts are also more environmentally friendly because the smoke gets recirculated and re-burned’

The base of the kiln. ‘More and more people are moving towards retorts but we haven’t done that because they cost about £20,000 and we don’t have the throughput of barbecue charcoal to support that, so instead we have reduced our BBQ charcoal ring kiln burns to one or two year and have increased our production of Pet charcoal and gardeners biochar using a ‘clean burn’ kontiki kiln

‘At the base, on the outside, there are eight ports that are there to let air into the kiln. You can control the amount coming in by putting soaking wet bags of sand over the port, big bags called badgers and smaller ones called rabbits. I’ve no idea why they got their name’

There is a mixture of woods, starting off with birch logs at the bottom, to create a cartwheel. The cartwheel at the bottom creates a little bridge alongside the ports, resulting in an air channel which stops it all collapsing over the entrances and preventing the air getting in. We then put on a tunnel topper, which is made from the leftover edges pieces of ash and wood that have been planked. With the straight pieces of hardwood we try not to charcoal or firewood them, because they have more value as planks or beams

Moving the wood with a forklift. ‘We have a chainsaw mill, an attachment for a big chainsaw, so we can mill our own’

By restoring the coppice, they hope to reverse the decline in the numbers of birds and butterflies and make this form of woodland management a sustainable practice once again and relevant to 21st-century life

‘The tunnel top is just the slab wood – the edges you cut off before making the planks. After that I’m putting sticks over the top of the tunnels, which create platforms for the brown ends, which are the halfway point between wood and charcoal. They haven’t completely turned to charcoal, and on every burn there’ll be some of these brown ends that you keep back for the next burn. They’re very dry and halfway between wood and charcoal. They burn really well

Darryl Kelbrick uses a traditional ring kiln to create barbecue charcoal, and a kontiki cone kiln to make pet charcoal and gardeners biochar

Checking the burn and ensuring the lid falls to seal tightly about an hour after lighting the kiln. ‘The burn in total can be anything up to about 24 hours. The first hour is the free burn, where it’s just burning like a fire would and you set fire to the thing and get it up to heat, burning freely. That takes about an hour but can vary depending on the time of year, the wind and air temperature, things like that. Then you put it into the controlled state, which is lid on, chimneys on and then you’re controlling how much air goes in. This is the key part that stops it all just turning to ash’

‘Making charcoal is basically baking wood in a low oxygen environment. The posh word for it is pyrolysis – you’re burning wood but really restricting the oxygen. It’s the same principle as if you have a wood burner and shut it down at night, when you get up in the morning there will be bits of charcoal in there. That phase lasts for perhaps 12 or 18 hours, depending on how the state of the wood, but in theory our wood should be pretty dry here. Then you’re looking out for when to shut it down, when you’ve got to the point when it’s all turned to charcoal as much as possible’

‘You keep an eye on the smoke. When the smoke goes kind of hazy and a little bit blue that is, in theory, the time to shut it down’

‘There’s an art element to it, where I’m still learning after 10 years’

‘About halfway through an 18-hour controlled burn you’ve got to swap the chimneys around so the air is coming in from a different place, otherwise it burns unevenly’

The kiln is left to burn overnight. ‘I set my alarm for maybe 2am or 3am, get up, get dressed and trundle down there from the caravan to swap the chimneys over, check everything’s OK and, depending on how windy it is, adjust the ports to block off the air if need be. Then I go back to bed before checking it again when I wake up’

‘Living off-grid is half a job as well. We are our own utilities company, basically. We need to make sure the electric’s sorted and the water, and that takes some time out of your day. It’s also exciting working out how to make best use of the energy and trying to use renewable energy as much as possible – and using gas as little as we can. We buy gas and we use solar panels – in the winter we have to rely on a generator to back that up – but we are working things out so we use less and less gas’

‘You need to give yourself 10 years to learn the processes and get established. It sounds quite a long time but that’s quite quick because there’s lots to do in that 10 years. We’re certainly not sitting back and relaxing but we’re starting to enjoy it more. We’re in that purple patch you get between not knowing what you’re doing and it’s overwhelming, and then as time goes on when you get too good at it and it’s a bit boring. We’re in that middle bit at the moment and we’re just trying to enjoy it’