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If you go down to the woods today, specifically the woods of the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, you might be in for a big surprise. For there, in a glade, you will find a three metre high wooden sculpture of St Felix of Burgundy who brought Christianity to East Anglia in 600 AD.

The story goes that, on arrival, St. Felix was shipwrecked at the mouth of the nearby little Babingley River and was rescued by a family of beavers. In thanks, he appointed the father beaver as a bishop of the church which he subsequently established.

The commemorative sculpture, by Suffolk sculptor, Mark Goldsworthy, was commissioned by the villagers of the estate. To execute it, Mark camped out beside his work for several weeks in the summer of 2000, chipping away for up to ten hours a day, going out for water and supplies but otherwise staying with the job until St Felix was delivered. He is depicted carrying a coracle over his head with the soon-to-be-Bishop beaver clinging adoringly to his haunches.

There was then the case of Will Kemp, actor friend of Will Shakespeare, who in 1599 danced from London to Norwich for a bet, accompanied by Tom Sly, his tabourer (drummer), William Bee, his manservant and George Spratt who seems to have been a general factotum-cum-referee. The actual dancing took nine days but the whole trip lasted four weeks because Kemp was offered hospitality all along the way and stayed a while wherever it was especially good.

But it still wasn't an easy jaunt, potholed roads being the main problem, and Kemp incurred, among other afflictions, a badly sprained hip. On arrival in Norwich, he found the welcoming crowd to be not as big as he expected and so he went to an inn for the night and re-enacted his arrival the next morning to a much bigger crowd who feted him like royalty. So great was the crush that when he tried to dance, he caught his toe in a girl's petticoat which fell off, causing much ribaldry. Still, as he wrote in his book of the exploit, 'Nine Daies Wonder': '...thogh her smock wir course, it wir cleanely'. Well, that's a relief.

A memorial to Kemp was deemed desirable by the Norfolk Contemporary Art Society to be given to the City Council and it duly materialised in Chapelfield Gardens, a small park in central Norwich, carved by Mark from an oak trunk, the sides of which are now adorned by depictions of Kemp and his three attendants.

Then there was the job in the Norfolk market town of North Walsham where the council wanted a memorial to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. The Revolt, principally against the Poll Tax although that was the clincher of a number of grievances, was led in Norfolk by one Geoffrey Litester, a local printer. He had taken his cue from Watt Tyler in Kent and led locals against the landed gentry. Unfortunately, unbeknown immediately to Litester, the Kent rebellion had petered out when Tyler was cut down by the Mayor of London while picking a fight with a barracker during a summit meeting with the King. But by then, Litester had already burned his boats by lording it over the gentry - killing a few and making others serve him at table on their knees - which meant that he was anyway a marked man.

Henry Despenser, an example of that remarkable medieval phenomenon, the Fighting Bishop, rode over from his seat in Rutland and put the rebels to the sword, even using insider information to kill a few in the church where they had taken refuge because he knew that the church, still under construction, had not yet been consecrated.

But sympathy still rests on balance with the rebels, despite Litester's excesses, and they are now remembered in Mark's sculpture. It was carved from the in-situ stump of an oak which, suffering from die-back, was threatening to drop a hefty bough onto an adjacent children's day nursery. The broad design was agreed on the basis of a sketch which Mark produced after various ideas had been discussed with the Council. It shows a number of figures, all slightly larger than life, helping each other up a column in a common striving against oppression.

Mark lives in the Suffolk town of Bungay but works throughout much of East Anglia.

After art school where he studied sculpture and painting, he concentrated on painting for a while, mainly, he says, because pictures took less time than sculptures and thus produced a financial return more quickly. But he had always been messing about with wood and gradually moved on to sculpting. He has been doing large wooden sculptures for the last ten years.

'There is a bit of a knack to working on this grand scale' he says. 'I usually produce sketches to show the client prior to starting work, but thereafter, the actual detail is worked out as the job progresses. It's not so much then a question of working from drawings as from rule of thumb - more a matter of standing back and working it out. With this sort of work, you have to expect that things will change as you progress I prefer to work quite slowly with hand tools because there are decisions to be made all the time and if you rush in too quickly - as with a chainsaw - you may find that you have cut in too far.'

The process usually begins with some chainsaw work to change a tree trunk into something with contours roughly approximating to those of the finished idea. Then comes the axe and the adse which are followed the chisels and gouges of graduating refinement.

'Where the work involves human figures, life-size or otherwise, I use myself as a model to get the approximate proportions. The point is that the carving is fairly broad and it is possible to get character without a great deal of detail. It is mostly a question of where you put the lines and where the shadows fall that gives a face character.'

The gouges and chisels cover a range of varying curves and sweeps to accommodate the angles to be worked. There are straight gouges and salmon bends and spoon bends and straight chisels and back bend chisels - good for getting behind other bits of work - and then V-gouges of varying sizes and angles.

But these big outdoor jobs are mainly for the summer because of the limited daylight and the problems of winter weather. 'There is really only a six month window in which this type of work can be done' he says. 'In winter, it is invariably wet and that can make the surface slippery and dangerous, and anyway, wet tools can stain the wood. There is firstly the tannin which reacts with steel and turns black, and if you work in the wet on a piece of oak, the tannin runs off the steel onto the wood. Wet tools rust quickly with the action of the tannin on the steel. Whenever I get back to the workshop, the first job is to wire wool the tools.'

Wintertime sees Mark retreat to his workshop to produce smaller items ranging from wooden spoons and other domestic implements to the decorations - notably, of late, horse head motifs - for Romany waggons.

One upcoming winter project is the building of a complete waggon, or vardo, in co-operation with one of his Romany clients. They will build a Burton, one of the half a dozen traditional types which developed in Victorian times once the roads were good enough to take those sometimes fragile conveyances. They have a former brewery dray, the usual chassis used as underworks by waggon builders even such as there are today, and they will be going for top quality in every respect from the pine and ash superstructure to the internal fittings and final decorative paintwork.

There aren't many waggons of great age surviving, and very few indeed from before the First World War, partly because traditionally, a Romany's vardo was burnt when he died, but also because they were never particularly durable and misuse or rough roads quickly took their toll. Those that do survive in good and original condition are worth a lot of money.

Quality waggons - even new ones - are reckoned to change hands occasionally for tens of thousands of pounds at the various horse fairs around the country although, in a community which makes its living by dealing and whose market is therefore anything but transparent, no-one really knows the prices except those involved in the deals, and people do tend to get carried away a little at horse fairs, both in what they pay and what they say.

But even if the waggon market turns out to be a little soft when this project is finished, another work of art on the grand scale will have been created. And, anyway, Mark could perhaps use it for travelling from one large sculpting job to another until prices picked up.