Last week the Woodlanders group on Facebook passed the 10,000 members mark – and they sent us this rather garish image to use! Now is a good time to look back and think about the aims of the group.
It started back in February 2018 with the observation that Facebook had become the main forum where people talked about woodlands and forestry, with web boards and mailing lists dying out, and other big platforms like Reddit not getting a look in. But what was really striking was how people with a stake in woodlands and forestry were in “bubbles” and not talking to each other. Often, not even aware of each other.
This week I went to this year’s APF Exhibition for the first time, held at Ragley Hall south of Birmingham. The APF is the UK’s largest trade show for forestry and woodlands, and has been running every other year since the 1970s, apart from a COVID break in 2020. Hundreds of exhibitors and tens of thousands of visitors. With £80 million of equipment on display last time, the emphasis of the event is naturally on “Big Forestry”. However, there are also areas for traditional woodland crafts including pole lathes, charcoal burning, and horse logging. Several major competitions are hosted by the event: in chainsaw carving, pole climbing, forwarder driving, and fence building. And there are stands for the Forestry Commission, the Royal Forestry Society, the Small Woods Association, and the National Coppice Federation. I managed to talk to quite a few people and also took the photos below.
This is the third in a series of videos about finding and about buying your own woodland. Here I talk about some Do’s and Don’ts for your first year of ownership.
Text of the video
This is the third in a series of videos for people wanting to own a woodland. It’s aimed at prospective buyers and people who have recently bought a wood, but some of the material will be relevant for existing owners too.
This is the second of a series of videos for people wanting to own a woodland. It’s aimed at prospective buyers but some of the material will be relevant for existing owners too. In the first video I talked about how to find a woodland you might want to buy, what to look for when you read the description of the woodland and visit it in person, and then make an offer to buy it. Now we come to the legal process of paying the money and getting ownership, and trying to avoid nasty surprises along the way.
Text of the video
This is the second of a series of videos for people wanting to own a woodland. It’s aimed at prospective buyers but some of the material will be relevant for existing owners too.
In the first video I talked about how to find a woodland you might want to buy, what to look for when you read the description of the woodland and visit it in person, and then make an offer to buy it. Now we come to the legal process of paying the money and getting ownership, and trying to avoid nasty surprises along the way.
This is the first of a series of YouTube videos for people wanting to own a woodland. It’s aimed at prospective buyers but some of the material will be relevant for existing owners too. I bought my own wood, Century Wood, back in 2008 when the idea of individuals and families buying private woodlands was already becoming popular, with articles in national newspapers and on TV. Interest has continued to increase, with a corresponding increase in prices, in tandem with the general increase in rural land values driven by rising food and commodity costs. Subsequent videos will be about buying and owning your own woodland, but this first one is about finding a wood you want to buy. Please subscribe to the channel to be notified when the new videos appear.
Text of the video
This is the first of a series of videos for people wanting to own a woodland. It’s aimed at prospective buyers but some of the material will be relevant for existing owners too.
I bought my own wood, Century Wood, back in 2008 when the idea of individuals and families buying private woodlands was already becoming popular, with articles in national newspapers and on TV. Interest has continued to increase, with a corresponding increase in prices, in tandem with the general increase in rural land values driven by rising food and commodity costs.
Henry David Thoreau famously borrowed an axe in 1845 and went to the woods to build himself a cabin. Well in the spring of 2024, I went to the woods to cut myself a walking stick, and began my journey from my home at the north edge of Cheshire, to Century Wood in Shropshire. A walk of over 78 miles over five days, mostly along the canal towpaths.
Normally the journey is 80 minutes in the car. Listening to a couple of podcast episodes maybe, or some music. But since about 2018 I started planning to walk there, because I only feel I really know where places are relative to each other by walking. For me, walking answers the question “But how far is it really?” Plus I realised I could use the canal towpaths for most of the distance and so it would be a lovely walk through the countryside from town to town, without miles of slogging through muddy fields or walking busy roads.
(I’ve also made the text and photos of this blog available as a video.)
Here is my first new video about the wood for quite a while, about clearing one of the rides back in October 2022.
This video shows reopening one of the woodland tracks in Century Wood in Shropshire that had become overgrown. Woodland tracks were called rides if they were open enough to ride a horse along them. At Century Wood the network of rides provides a way of getting around on foot or with the tractor without trampling lots of ground flora. The sunlight is able to get in and encourage grass to grow and we get a wider variety of plants on the edges than if there was just deep shade from the trees. But, the rides are an artificial, human intervention, and the wood is always trying to reclaim them. Left alone, the trees drop branches, nettles and brambles grow, and bushes and then new trees start to get established, and the ride will disappear. There is a stretch of one of the rides which I neglected for the past few years, and in this video I reopen it.
I’ve written about the practicalities of woodland planning over the years and created an extensive guide to the legal situation on the Century Wood website. But here I’m going to present a “shopping list” of what changes I’d like to see.
There is a lot of emphasis on woodland creation at the moment. The benefits of woodland that are promoted include “boosting wildlife, providing shelter for livestock, preventing soil erosion, reducing flooding, providing timber, supporting the economy, and improving mental health and wellbeing.” Those benefits rely on appropriate management, including human interventions which replace the actions of species we removed in the past.
This has been a week of flooding in Shropshire and much of the rest of the country. At Century Wood, the water levels have been higher as they usually are in winter, and our seasonal ponds where the water table breaks through the surface, are back.
Here are two contrasting photos of one of the boundary ditches: on the left, to show the depth of the ditch, here it is empty during the drought year of 2011 when I believe water was diverted for irrigation; and almost overflowing this week. That fallen log is the standing tree with the fork in the 2011 photo.
There is normally a foot or two of water in that ditch all year round. This next photo is of another drainage ditch which is normally dry but fills up and then starts flowing when there are floods. A bit back from the ditch is a dead tree with orange fruiting bodies from the fungi consuming the rotting timber inside. The fungus is something like Velvet Shank.
