“Every winter the railway burned it by the track. I turned it into Christmas.” Why a 70-year-old Kent woodwork teacher is selling his last hand-cut tree boards before Christmas

His father walked the line between Tonbridge and Ashford for thirty years. Every winter the gangs cut back the false acacia that grows wild along the embankments, and every bit of it went on a fire by the track. In 1986 Merrick pulled one trunk off the pile. Two Christmases later he cut his wife a tree out of it, and that same tree-shaped board has carried the mince pies every Christmas Eve since.

Paddock Wood, November. The workshop is the old brick shed at the end of the garden, past the apple tree and the compost bins, ten feet by twelve. It smells of sawdust, linseed and, faintly, the paraffin heater in the corner. The bench is worn pale in two places where his forearms rest. On the wall hang a row of rasps, an old tenon saw and one photograph: a kitchen table on Christmas Eve, 1988, with a plate of mince pies sitting on a small wooden tree.

“My dad was a lengthsman,” Merrick says. “He walked his stretch of track every day of the year. False acacia was the thing he fought hardest. Nobody plants it on purpose. It just comes up the embankment, and you cut it, and it comes back thicker.” Every winter the gangs cleared it, stacked it by the line and burned it. In the winter of 1986 they cleared the whole bank behind the station. Merrick was thirty and teaching woodwork at the secondary school in Tonbridge. He spent the weekends watching it burn.

“I wasn’t saving anything,” he says. “The tree was already down. I just couldn’t watch good wood go up in smoke.” He carried one trunk home on the roof of his Escort. It sat in the shed for two years drying out. Then, in 1988, with the mortgage rate going up every few months and nothing left for presents, he cut his wife Maureen a Christmas tree out of it instead. It has carried the mince pies every Christmas Eve since, and the rest of the year it leans against her splashback.

Two things ruin a wooden chopping board

“Everybody buys the cheap one once,” he says. “By February it rocks on the worktop like a see-saw and the shiny stuff on top is coming off in flakes. So you buy another one.”

The first is the coating. Run your thumbnail over most Christmas boards in the shops and it slides. That gloss is lacquer, or a “food-safe” finish sprayed over the wood so it photographs well. A knife cuts through it in the first week. Water gets in underneath, it goes cloudy, and then it lifts in flakes, right where the cheese and the mince pies go. You can’t oil through it, and you can’t sand it off without ending up with a thinner board.

The second is wood that was dried too fast. A freshly cut trunk is heavy with water. Cheap boards are cut green and pushed through a kiln in days. They look perfect in the box and then warp or split a few weeks later on your worktop. Merrick air-dries every trunk in the shed for two years before the band saw touches it.

He throws away one board in five to stay ahead of the second problem. He doesn’t have the first one at all, because nothing goes on his boards but food-safe mineral oil.

Why a coated board can’t be saved

Every December somebody turns up at the Christmas fair in the village hall with a board under their arm and asks him to fix it. Never one of his. These are boards people bought from a homeware chain or online, sometimes for good money. There’s a crate under his bench full of the ones he had to hand back: a bamboo platter peeling in long strips, an acacia board gone grey and rough under its lacquer, and a tree-shaped one from a supermarket with the finish coming off in flakes.

He can tell you what killed each one in about four seconds. What nobody can do is bring them back. “There’s nothing in there to mend,” he says. “Once that coating starts to go, it keeps going. Sand it all off and what you’ve got left is the warped board that was under it the whole time.”

Most of those people go home with one of his instead. Kent false acacia, mineral oil and nothing else. No coating to flake off two Christmases from now.

What comes off a plastic chopping board

In 2023, engineers at North Dakota State University measured something nobody had bothered to measure: what actually comes off a chopping board when a knife hits it, over and over, the way it does in a real kitchen.

On the common white plastic chopping boards, the answer was somewhere between 14 and 79 million tiny plastic particles a year, depending on the type of plastic. Their equipment could only count the bigger ones, so the real number is higher.

Every board gives up a little of itself under a knife. The difference is what it gives up. Plastic gives up plastic, and plastic doesn’t break down, not in the bin, not in the ground, not in you. Wood gives up wood.

What makes Merrick’s board different

• Shaped by hand: Cut out on the band saw, then every edge and every tip rounded and sanded by hand. Nothing sharp, nothing that snags a jumper sleeve.
• From the bonfire, not the forest: The wood is false acacia, or robinia, cleared off Kent railway banks and roadside verges. No tree is planted, grown or felled to make a board.
• Harder than beech: False acacia scores around 1,700 on the Janka hardness scale. Beech, the wood most British boards are made of, scores around 1,300. A harder face means shallower knife marks.
• Honest about the strips: Embankment trees never grow wide, so each board is three to five strips of the same trunk, joined edge to edge with food-safe glue. That’s where the bands of honey and dark brown come from.
• Dried slowly, then rested: Two years of air drying in the shed before the first cut. This is the step cheap boards skip.
• Food-safe finish only: Sanded by hand and oiled with food-safe mineral oil. No lacquer, no sealant, nothing to chip off into your food.
• Three shapes: The Classic is the 1988 tree, 20 × 30 cm. The Star has rounded tiers and a star on top, also 20 × 30 cm. The Reindeer is a longer board with antlers for a handle, 34.7 × 21 cm, made for the Boxing Day ham.

One board, two sides, two jobs

Merrick sands and oils both faces, because he knows how a board actually gets used in December. One side takes the knife: the Cheddar, the sausage rolls, the onions for the stuffing. Turn it over and the other side goes on the table with Stilton, grapes, crackers and a sprig of rosemary at the top. Same board, two jobs, and nothing about it says kitchen utensil when the family walks in.

The Reindeer came later. In 1994 Maureen asked for something long enough for the Boxing Day ham that wasn’t another tree, so he gave the board a set of antlers to hold it by. The Star was his granddaughter’s idea. She was four, and she said a Christmas tree without a star on top wasn’t finished.

What his customers say

• ★★★★★

  “I gave the Star to my mum for Christmas and very nearly kept it. She ran her thumb all the way round the edge looking for a rough bit and couldn’t find one. It was on her table with the cheese on by Christmas Eve, and three people asked her where it came from.”

  – Sandra K., 63, Chelmsford, Essex
• ★★★★★

  “My last acacia board came from a homeware shop and was rocking on the worktop by February. This one I use most days, oil it once a month, and after a full year it still sits dead flat. It’s smaller than a platter, which he tells you up front, and it’s the right size.”

  – Graham P., 67, Shrewsbury, Shropshire
• ★★★★★

  “Bought the Reindeer for the Boxing Day ham and the Classic for the cheese. I chop on the back and put the front on the table. That used to be four things in my cupboard and now it’s two, and they look better than any of them did.”

  – Bev T., 58, Lincoln

One man, one pair of hands

Merrick is 70 and he works alone. There’s no second bench in the shed, no apprentice, and neither of his children wanted the trade. His son drives trains out of Ashford. His daughter is a dental nurse in Tunbridge Wells. “It takes years before you have it in your hands,” he says. “Nobody has that kind of patience for a chopping board any more.”

And his hands have started to say so too. The joints at the base of both thumbs ache by mid-morning now, and gripping the sanding block costs him more each month. “I’ll do this Christmas,” he says. “After that, we’ll see.” What comes out of that shed in a good week is what one man can saw, sand and oil by himself, and one in five of those goes on the bonfire before it is ever wrapped. That’s the entire supply. There’s no factory behind it and no second batch waiting on a shelf somewhere.

His granddaughter Jodie (27), a midwife in Maidstone, set the little shop up online for him over a single weekend. “At my age I don’t know the first thing about all that internet business,” he says. “She told me I wasn’t spending another December behind a trestle table in the village hall. She was right.”

Where can you buy Merrick’s Christmas tree board?

The boards are sold only through County Craft, where Jodie looks after his orders. Not on Amazon, not in a shop, not through anybody else. Most of them go out as Christmas presents. Jodie says more than half are posted to somebody other than the person who paid: a mum, a sister, the friend who hosts every year. Every board leaves the shed oiled and wrapped, ready to go straight under the tree. There are 143 boards left across all three shapes, and when they’re gone, that’s this Christmas done.

One word of warning: a lacquered board photographs almost exactly like an oiled one in a listing photo. The difference shows on the first cut, when the knife either goes into wood or skates across a coating.

Slice on it. Serve on it. Put it in front of fourteen people on Christmas Eve. If it isn’t right, the size, the grain or no reason at all, send it back within 90 days for your money back. No restocking fee, and nobody will ask you to explain yourself.