Holly vs blackthorn vs oak vs ash

The four traditional stick woods of the British and Irish countryside are blackthorn, oak, holly, and ash. Each one ended up in the tradition for a particular set of reasons; each one produces a recognisably different finished object; and most stick-makers working today will use all four at different times, depending on what the client is asking for.

This is the side-by-side. The long-form notes on each wood are linked from the relevant section.

At a glance

	Blackthorn	Oak	Holly	Ash
Binomial	Prunus spinosa	Quercus robur / petraea	Ilex aquifolium	Fraxinus excelsior
Density	~770–810 kg/m³	~700–760 kg/m³	~770–820 kg/m³	~680–720 kg/m³
Janka hardness	Not standard-tested; comparable to hawthorn	~5,000 N	~5,500–6,500 N	~5,000 N
Colour	Near-black heartwood, reddish-brown	Light brown, ages to honey	Almost white	Pale cream to light brown
Grain	Tight, sometimes interlocked	Open, prominent ray fleck	Very fine, even, often featureless	Open, ring-porous, distinct figure
Typical length	16–48 in (limited by shrub size)	Any	30–60 in (slow-growing trees)	Any
Seasoning	1–3 years (more for roots)	1–2 years	1–2 years (debark early)	1 year
Iconic form	Shillelagh; short walking stick	Long walking stick; staff	Thumb-stick; show-stick	Staff; tool-handle
Strongest tradition	Ireland	Ireland (Wicklow); England	Scotland; Wales	Across all four countries

All density and Janka figures are working figures, drawn from The Wood Database and traditional craft sources, and all merit [VERIFY] against a primary timber-database reading for any specific maker’s project.

Blackthorn

Full reference: /woods/blackthorn/.

Blackthorn is the iconic Irish stick wood. Dark, dense, slow-seasoning, irregular in form, and limited in length by the size of the shrub itself, it is the wood of the shillelagh — short, knobbed, weighted at the head — and of the shorter Irish walking stick. The defining visual feature of a blackthorn shaft is the trimmed thorn-nubs that remain after the live thorns are removed; the defining tactile feature is the natural root burl that becomes the knob.

Best for: shillelaghs; short walking sticks where the dark, irregular character of the wood is the point; pieces where the maker wants the stick to be visibly Irish without elaboration.

Worse for: long staves (the wood doesn’t reliably grow that long); ceremonial or formal sticks where evenness is desired; pieces where a pale colour is wanted.

Oak

Full reference: /woods/oak/.

Oak is the older Irish stick wood, the one carried by the place-name etymology of shillelagh itself. It is mid-toned (light brown when freshly worked, deepening to honey with oil and age), open-grained with the famous ray-fleck on quarter-sawn pieces, and available in any length the maker can find. Where blackthorn is the wood of the hedge, oak is the wood of the larger wood: the formal walking stick, the long staff, the ceremonial piece.

Best for: long walking sticks; staves; presentation and ceremonial pieces; sticks where dimensional consistency and clean grain are wanted; the Wicklow oak tradition specifically.

Worse for: short shillelaghs (without a root burl, the natural knob is harder to come by); pieces where the maker wants the stick to read as small-batch and rural rather than crafted and formal.

Holly

Full reference: /woods/holly/.

Holly is the wood of the Scottish and Welsh upland stick traditions — the thumb-stick, the show-stick, the gillie’s stick. It is the palest of the four woods (almost white when fresh, ageing to a soft cream), the hardest by Janka measure, and one of the slowest-growing. The grain is fine and even, almost featureless, with the visual quality of polished bone. A holly stick is heavier in the hand than its dimensions suggest, brighter in colour than anything else native to the region, and — at length — strikingly different from any other British or Irish stick.

Best for: thumb-sticks; long, fork-handled walking sticks; show-sticks where pale colour is the visual point; pieces where the wood is meant to read as crafted rather than rustic.

Worse for: shillelaghs (the colour is wrong; the form is wrong); sticks where the maker wants visible character in the surface.

Ash

There is no dedicated reference page for ash on the journal yet, so this section is slightly longer than the others.

Common ash (Fraxinus excelsior) is a common large deciduous tree of the British and Irish countryside, native across most of Europe, with distinctive opposite-paired pinnate leaves, prominent black winter buds, and the recognisable winged seeds (the “ash keys”) that hang in clusters through the autumn. Mature trees reach 25–35 metres; the wood is harvested both from coppiced pole-wood and from larger felled trunks.

The wood is pale to light brown, with sapwood often indistinguishable from heartwood; ring-porous, with the spring-wood pores very large and the late-wood almost solid, giving it a clearer figure than any other common British timber. Density runs around 680–720 kg/m³, slightly less than oak; Janka hardness is around 5,000 N, similar to oak.

What ash is celebrated for, in the working-craft tradition, is shock resistance. The grain structure makes ash extraordinarily good at absorbing impact without fracturing; this is why ash has historically been the wood of choice for tool handles (axes, hammers, billhooks), for the longbow (where yew was the preferred wood but ash was the substitute), and — most relevant to this site — for the camán, the hurling stick of Irish national sport, which is made of ash by tradition and by competition rule.

For walking sticks specifically, ash is the wood of the staff rather than the shillelagh. A long ash stick is light for its size, springy under load, and durable in a way that the harder but more brittle woods are not. The traditional shepherd’s crook of upland England and Wales is often ash with a horn handle. The Highland walking stick used by the older generation of stalkers and gillies is often ash. The Wexford and Tipperary hurling tradition keeps the wood in active use at scale; what does not go into camáns goes into farm-tool handles and a small but steady output of plain working walking sticks.

Best for: long walking sticks; staves; shepherd’s crooks; sticks where the wood needs to take impact without breaking.

Worse for: shillelaghs (wrong character — too pale, too straight, no natural knob); pieces where dark colour is wanted.

A note that is necessary in 2026: European ash is in the middle of a population-level health crisis from ash dieback (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus), a fungal disease introduced into Europe in the 1990s and now established across Britain and Ireland. Mature ash continues to die at scale; the long-term picture for the species in these islands is uncertain. Ash from sustainably-managed dieback-tolerant stock is now the rarer commercial product. A stick-maker working in ash today is, in part, working against a disappearing material.

Which to choose

For the buyer or the new maker trying to decide, this is the simplest version:

• A short Irish stick — a shillelagh, a club, a presentation gift in the Irish tradition — is blackthorn, full stop. Use one of the other woods only if you have a specific reason to, and be prepared for the result not to read as iconically Irish.

• A long walking stick to use on roads and gentle hills, in the Irish or English tradition — is most often oak or ash, with oak the heavier and more formal choice and ash the lighter and more practical one. Either is correct. Blackthorn at this length is unusual and harder to source.

• A long thumb-stick or fork-handled walking stick, in the Scottish or Welsh tradition — is holly, by tradition, with the natural Y-fork at the top. Blackthorn does not produce this form reliably; oak and ash can but rarely do.

• A staff — five feet or more, for serious hill-walking — is ash, in almost every case. The shock-resistance and the springy character of the wood under load are the reasons.

• A working tool handle, an axe haft, a hurley — is ash. None of the other woods reach the same combination of strength and impact-resistance.

The four woods are not interchangeable, and a maker who tries to use the wrong wood for the wrong form is, almost always, fighting the material rather than working with it. The tradition has been in place for long enough — three hundred years for blackthorn and oak, longer for ash and holly — that the matches between wood and form are not arbitrary. They reflect what each tree actually is.

A reader who is comparing real handmade pieces from a maker should expect to see the wood named, and to see the wood match the form. A maker who labels a stick as blackthorn and produces something pale, straight, and uniform is — at best — using the wood imprecisely, and probably using a different one.

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This piece pairs with What is a shillelagh? on the form side, and with the individual wood reference pages on the material side: blackthorn, oak, holly, and (in preparation) ash.