DURING the early months of this year, I was pleasantly surprised by the large quantity of hazel nuts hanging upon the bushes that line the route of my morning walk. This morning when I followed that same route, there was none.

So what has happened to all that lovely wild fruit? Certainly, it has not ripened - I would have seen it and been tempted to help myself to a pocketful - so it seems that some mysterious creature has removed all those unripe nuts.

If I were to place a bet upon the identity of the culprit or culprits, I would blame grey squirrels because several are resident within a short distance of those hazels. It would not surprise me to learn that grey squirrels will eat the unripe nuts.

However, the nuts of the hazel are also popular with other creatures such as wood pigeons, jays and pheasants, although a pheasant would rely upon mature and ripe specimens that have fallen to the ground. So how does a pheasant crack open a hazel nut?

Nuts apart, the hazel is one of our most plentiful and popular small trees, a feature of many a hedgerow and small copse. If left to its own devices, a hazel can grow up to 30ft tall (9m or so) but many of them in hedgerows are cut so that they produce lots of slender stems from one root.

This technique, known as coppicing, has several benefits. For one thing it ensures a steady supply of hazel rods that serve many purposes while creating a fairly dense barrier that produces a useful hedge. For hedging, hazel rods are bent over and woven into existing bushes such as hawthorn, although some hedges are made entirely of laid hazel rods. This produces a living barrier.

Hazel rods have lots of other uses.

Even 3,000 years ago, our ancestors realised the potential of the very pliable hazel rods by using them to make the framework of primitive boats. The frames were then covered with animal skins to produce coracles.

Another popular domestic use was in house construction when early man created the famous wattle and daub homes. Stout wooden posts, usually of oak, formed the main section of the house walls, but the smaller frames in between the posts were made from hazel rods. A mixture of mud and straw was then plastered across the frames to make a weather-proof wall. Hazel rods were also used to secure the thatch of cottage roofs.

Within our farms and markets such rods were widely used to create animal pens, but were also useful for basket making, divining for water and making very handsome walking sticks and shepherds' crooks.

The bark of the hazel can be polished into a wonderful deep brown and its wood both carved and bent to produce attractive and intriguing shapes. Stick-making is now a popular feature of many rural shows where the samples on display are both artistic and highly functional.

In bygone times the hazel had the reputation of a holy tree when the pagan Celts associated it with poetry, wisdom, knowledge, fire and fertility. Its timber was one of the nine sacred woods used to kindle fire during great festivals such as Beltane that occurred on May Day.

Cattle were driven through the flames either to protect them against disease or to prepare them for sacrifice.

It reputation as a magic tree arose because its wood was widely used when divining water or metal beneath the ground. Diviners would make use of forked hazel twigs during their searches and there is little doubt that those pieces of wood were regarded as either magical or miraculous. Even today, most of us are baffled by the diviners' art when seeking either water or metal in this ancient style.

Such magical attributes of the hazel led to its twigs being gathered on Palm Sunday and taken into the house where they were placed in vases of water to keep them alive. It was believed they protected the house against lightning strikes and thunderstorms, while hazel catkins within the house were similarly thought to be beneficial to sheep during the lambing season. Small caps of hazel twigs and leaves worn on the head were also thought to protect Welsh sailors when at sea.

Not surprisingly, the hazel has featured in weather prognostications when it was thought plenty of nuts heralded a hot and dry harvest.

The absence of our local nuts this year was perhaps a very accurate forecast.

SUNDAY heralds the autumn equinox with the following day, September 22, being the first official day of autumn. The word equinox comes from two Latin words, aequus meaning equal, and nox meaning night.

It occurs twice a year when the sun crosses the celestial equator to make night and day of equal duration throughout the world. The vernal equinox in March heralds the first day of spring. The fact that our autumn begins on September 22 causes some confusion when newspaper and television weather programmes insist on saying that autumn begins on September 1.

The fact is that the Meteorological Office bases its forecasts on dates that differ from the long established - the Met office summer, for example, runs from June 1 to August 31 whereas the official summer long used by country folk throughout the nation is from June 21 to September 21.

September 21 is also the feast day of St Matthew and there is an old Yorkshire country saying that "St Matthew shuts up the bees and brings the cold, the rain and the dew." Certainly, country people of the past were guided by this date for it heralded the time to set aside the things of summer to prepare for the coming autumn, even though September can be fine and warm.

Even now, we can see how the nights grow darker far earlier than only weeks ago, and this was heralded by the rustic advice, "St Matthew, get candles new."

If our forebears became worried about changes in the weather of autumn, they were sometimes cheered by the fact that, on September 21, the wind might be coming from the south. That was generally regarded as a sign that the rest of the month would be mild and dry.

MY correspondence this week includes a letter from a reader living in Catterick.

He refers to my notes about the word bield that appears on modern moorland maps (D&S Times Aug 29), but particularly my query about the meaning of mussy bield.

The word bield on its own refers to a primitive shelter or weather shield for use by sheep.

I mentioned that mussy is an old dialect pronunciation of the word mercy (have mussy on us meaning having mercy on us). My correspondent informs me that a mussy bield is in fact a shelter designed for use by travellers or anyone who is lost or delayed during their journey. That would indicate that such structures were placed on the moors as an act of mercy, hence their names.

The next questions must be: who placed them there? And what was the builder's inspiration for such an act? The mussy bield near Goathland is not far from what was probably an ancient moorland track and indeed quite close to the famous Roman road upon those moors. It would seem to be a wonderful act of humanity to erect such a free shelter, however primitive, for the use of one's fellows in times of great need.