WOOD you believe it - crafty author Rob Penn felled an ash tree and found 44 different uses for it and made hundreds of useful items.

Rob toured Britain with his fresh cut timber planks for craftsmen to create items from cricket stumps to a coracle - and at the end of it sat down at a desk made from his tree to write a book.

’The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees’ is Black Mountains based Rob’s ode

to the native British tree. He will be talking about the book and his travels, which also included visiting Ireland and the United States, at the Hay Festival Winter Weekend.

"Wood is organic and changes all the time you own it, it’s almost like having a living object in your house," said Rob of his passion for the material.

"It affects senses in different ways, you can run your fingers over wood and smell it in a way you would never do with an iPad. Ash wood was common in almost every home up until the Second World War. Plastic only became really widely used about 40 or 50 years ago."

The ash tree Rob cut down had stood for 125 years at Callow Hill Wood at Ewyas Harold near Pontrillas and it was the threat to the trees from an outbreak of fungal disease ash dieback in 2012 that inspired the book.

"I thought this tree might be something that is about to disappear from the landscape," said Rob who’d previously made a television series for BBC Four in which he restored a Welsh wood in the Black Mountains.

"They’ve had ash dieback on continental Europe for about 20 years longer than us and it has killed about 70 per cent of the trees. It’s safe to assume as it plays it’s way out across Britain it will kill somewhere north of 50% of our ash trees, that’s 50 million trees."

Ash is a sustainable material that Rob wanted to champion and demonstrate the variety of uses that could be found for his tree after having it cut into planks by Whitney-on-Wye Saw Mills. Rob was also advised by Martin Frazer, from Brecon, who has a mobile saw mill.

"I got 44 different uses from it and the actual number of objects run into hundreds as I made 25 tent pegs for example. I tried to use the wood completely, from nose to tail like a pig," said 48-year-old Rob.

As he wrote his book Rob also visited two countries where the ash tree is integral to their sporting culture.

"In America the rules of Major League Baseball state the bats have to be made of wood.

"It seems extraordinary the country that has led the world throughout the technological advances of the 21 Century still plays it’s most important game with a wooden stick."

Rob didn’t take his own ash wood to be made into a baseball bat however as he doesn’t believe wood should be imported and exported while his ash was too old to be made into a hurling stick in Ireland.

"To be made into a hurling stick an ash tree needs to be between 25 to 40 years old.

"Hurling is a fantastic game that is almost unique in the homogenised sporting culture and rather than play with a modern carbon stick they play with an ash stick that is handmade," said Rob who attended an All Ireland semi-final at Dublin’s Croke Park that drew around 65,000 spectators.

Rob Penn will be appearing at the Swan Hotel as part of the Hay Winter Weekend on Saturday, November 28 at 4pm.