“Finding your woodland” video

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.

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. 

There are three main routes to finding a woodland. What we might call retailers, traditional land auctions, and word of mouth.

The “retailers”

With the growth in interest in buying woodlands, mostly for recreation and small scale wood and timber production, companies selling woods on something like a retail basis have emerged. They advertise woodlands with fixed prices and a relatively quick process. It’s common for rural land to include an invitation to view it at any reasonable time if in possession of a copy of the sale particulars. The advertisement for the land in other words. This is so the current landowner knows you’re a genuine buyer if they run into you. So with these retail agents, you look through the woods they advertise on their websites, look at the photos and maps they provide, print off or download a copy, head off to the wood to view it in person, and then offer to pay the asking price. They may now ask for a deposit or proof that you have the money at hand, and then they take it off the market, you instruct a solicitor, and you wait a few weeks during the conveyancing process including searches, pay, and then it’s yours. Simple. Of course you pay a premium for the simplicity of a fixed price with these retail agents.

There are two main agents who use this retail model. First, Woodland Investments Limited which runs the woodlands.co.uk website. Over the years they’ve done a lot to promote woodland ownership, from working with journalists to place a lot of those newspaper articles, to producing a series of short videos on aspects of woodland ownership. 

Early on they faced organised opposition to the woodlotting model of buying woodlands and selling them off in smaller more affordable plots, but with a higher price per acre. A lot of the opposition seemed to be coming from neighbours who perhaps wished they owned the woodland and resented new owners from outside the immediate area. Even so, questions were raised in the House of Commons with Woodlands Investments singled out. To head off  opposition, they have developed a standard covenant which has evolved over the years and which they apply to almost all the woods they sell. This prevents antisocial uses, like dirt bike racing, and rules out changes of use from forestry. Since covenants bind future buyers too, you sometimes see woodlands being sold by other agents with a Woodland Investments covenant still in place.

The other major retail agent operates woods4sale.co.uk. My impression is that they have more of an emphasis on reselling smaller woodlands rather than buying larger woodlands and subdividing them, although they both deal in those two ways of working. 

The auctioneers

With the retailers out of the way, we come to the second and more traditional model. This is the auction. The well-established land agents use this model. They advertise woods alongside other types of rural property, including farms, small holdings and even huge Highland estates. Either a formal auction on a date is advertised, or some form of sealed bids auction process, or a price is given with a phrase like “offers over” or “offers around”. Again viewing is possible, either unaccompanied or with the agent present. And then you make your offer. Or offers. The agent works for the current owner, and even if the word auction is not mentioned at all, it is in the agent’s interest to try to get multiple buyers making higher and higher offers against each other, even if all by telephone up to a closing date announced once there is enough interest. Often the sale price is considerably higher than the original offers over price. It’s the uncertainty of this process that gave rise to the alternative retail model I talked about earlier.

Word of mouth

Finally, you might be able to find a woodland by some kind of word of mouth route. Maybe you put the word out that you’re looking in a particular area or you mention it on social media to get sellers to approach you. In principle, you could try contacting landowners, but this is unlikely to succeed because most people aren’t interested in selling and will be advertising already if they are. If you see a nice looking woodland by the side of the road that you’d like to own, chances are the existing owner thinks the same and has no desire to part with it. Some people do succeed with these unorthodox approaches, but they’re very much in the minority.

What to look for

In later videos I’m going to talk about issues like legal searches and access in more detail. But when you are looking at listings of woodlands, what are the details to look for? This depends on why you want to own a woodland. Do you want it for recreation? As a private nature reserve? As a source of timber or wood including firewood? As a place to run outdoor education events? Or something else? I would make a list of your general objectives in owning a wood so you can compare it against each wood you look at.

When looking at woods, the sale particulars should give you a lot of the information. They are often quite chatty and written in that upbeat but careful way that estate agents use. When looking through the particulars and then visiting in person, there are some key questions to ask yourself.

What type of woodland?

First, what type of woodland is it? The most important question is whether it is classed as Ancient Woodland. In England and Wales, that means it had tree cover before the year sixteen hundred. For Scotland, the cut off year is seventeen hundred. The assumption is that woodland that old is likely to have existed continuously since this island was repopulated by trees after the last ice age. Even though all woodland in Britain has had human interventions since prehistory, Ancient Woodlands are irreplaceable ecosystems that took thousands of years to accumulate a unique mix of species and habitats. Despite what politicians might tell you, it’s not possible to properly offset the destruction of Ancient Woodland by planting a new woodland somewhere else.

So, the things you can do with Ancient Woodland are more limited by regulations, and this is likely to increase over time as people become more concerned with protecting it. A related category are Plantations on Ancient Woodland Sites, usually where the site was cleared in the twentieth century and replanted with non-native conifer trees for timber. These PAWS sites often retain lots of the other species present when the site was cleared, and owners are now encouraged, with grants, to restore them with native tree species.

Many Ancient Woodlands are already classed as Sites of Special Scientific Interest. The particulars should tell you if this is the case, or if there are tree preservation orders in place from the local planning authority. I’ll explain how you can double check this in the next video. 

You also need to think about what tree species are present and what condition they are in. How do they match your objectives? You would need a felling license to do any substantial amounts of tree removal, but it is possible in principle to spend a few decades replacing the trees in a woodland with others. Is that something you want to take on? If you want a haven for native wildlife, then starting from a conifer plantation and replanting with native broadleaves might be a worthy enterprise, but it will take a long time to get established. 

How do you think it will look through the seasons. You’re unlikely to have the luxury of viewing the same wood through a whole year before buying. But can you compare it to others you know and draw on the photographs provided? Does it match your objectives?

Location?

Then think about the exact location of the woodland. Is it close enough for you to visit as often as you are planning, but is it too close to built up areas so trespassing and even petty theft becomes an issue? A woodland in the middle of houses maybe have been treated as a public park for years by nearby householders and their children, and they may react very badly if you try to exclude them or even make any changes. Sewage farms, chemicals works, landfill sites, motorways, and other sources of smells and noise are also things to look out for on the maps.

Access?

How flat is it? Lots of woodlands were retained or planted on sloping land unsuitable for farming. Would that be a problem for what you intend to do?

What is the physical access like for you, your friends and family, and for trespassers? Is it conveniently next to a council road? Or is it up a farm track or a shared track through a larger block of woodland? Is it drivable in all weathers? Would you need a four by four or would a family car be enough? Do the particulars say the buyer has a private right of way along the route, including for vehicles? Is there a public right of way nearby or even through it, and is it a footpath, bridleway for horses, or even a Byway Open to All Traffic and frequented by four by four enthusiasts at weekends? Do the particulars say anything about the upkeep of shared tracks? Does it sound reasonable?

Covenants

Is there a covenant restricting what you can do? Covenants are legal agreements placed on land when it is sold which benefit another piece of land. Typically a buyer promises not to be a nuisance to the neighbour who is selling them part of their original land. Will any clauses stop you doing activities that you have in mind?

What are the boundaries like? They say that good fences make good neighbours. Are the boundaries well defined by watercourses, stone walls, agricultural fences, or even just paint marks on trees?  Do the particulars say anything about who has the responsibility of maintaining the fences?

Who will own the sporting rights? That is, who will have the right to shoot deer and game species like pheasants? What about rough shooting of pest species like rabbits? If someone else, such as a previous owner, has the sporting rights still, they will typically have the right to enter the woodland with shotguns or even rifles. Similar access rights might be present if fishing rights are owned by another person or even an angling club.  

Next time … 

So let’s say you are certain it’s the wood for you. You’ve made an offer, won the auction, or followed whatever process the seller has used. You’ve had your offer accepted. What’s next? Well, in the next video I’ll talk about the legal process of buying your woodland and avoiding any nasty surprises.