CHARCOAL BURNERS IN EPPING FOREST. 67
hedge composed of bundles of faggots placed vertically, the
whole object being to keep the combustion as slow as possible,
any breaking through into flame being fatal. The innermost
range of cord-wood is built up horizontally, in the form
of a triangle. This forms a central chimney to the fire,
while the rest of the pile is placed vertically round. The
Collier's Row men placed the whole of their wood vertically,
and this was said by the Loughton men to be a mistake. The
pile is ignited down the central chimney, and the whole covered
over with "hearth-dust," as the waste ash from previous
burnings is called. The diagram (fig. i) shows the method in
which the cord-wood should be placed to build up the central
chimney of the pile.
I believe that, when the charcoal is
obtained in the original long pieces, or
only slightly broken, it is sometimes
spoken of as "cord-wood coal," and
when quite broken up it is called
"small coal." More usually, however,
so far as size is concerned, the charcoal
is separated into three grades. This

separation is effected during the pro-

Fig. I.—STRUCTURE IN
CENTRE OF WOOD PILE.
cess of "drawing the coal," to which I
shall refer later. When the pile has been pulled to pieces, and
the last remnants of the fire extinguished with water, all the
larger pieces of charcoal are picked up with an implement called
a "collier's rib shovel." This is made in the shape of a shovel,
but with open parallel bars about an inch and a-half apart.
Everything that will not pass through these bars is put first
into the sacks, and is usually called simply "the coal"; this forms
the first grade. The second grade is named "charm.'' This is
obtained by a second sifting of the material through an ordinary
gravel sieve. The third grade is called "dust," and is separated
by a fine-meshed sieve from the waste ash, the last-named being
used only for damping down future burnings. There is a
further division of "the coal" into three varieties, according to
the kind of wood from which it is made: "round coal" being
made of round wood; "cleft coal" being made of thicker wood
which has been split; and "old coal" made from knotty crowns
and irregular pieces.