billhook

Watch Tim Radford — in dreadlocks, just 36, the future of the sport — wielding his billhook blade and laying into his section of brush like the queen’s own tree surgeon.

Near the front of the seven hikers is a Welshman carrying a billhook, a backpack almost the same size as him, and what appears to all intents and purposes to be a briefcase.

Samuel likes harvesting tobacco because “you get to use a large knife called a billhook.”

It was frequently necessary to cut down with axes and billhooks the tangled undergrowth and creepers that wove themselves amid the trunks of the trees, in order to make room for the canoe to pass.

The Norman could conquer our billhooks, but not our tongues; and hard they tried it for many a long year by law and proclamation.