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.
In the first two videos I talked about ways of finding a woodland you might want to buy, and how the legal process goes once you’ve made an offer. Here I’m going to talk about how to get started once you’ve become the owner.
Wait!
The traditional advice to new owners is to wait a year or more before changing anything. Watch the full cycle of the seasons so you can see everything that happens and how it all changes from month to month. It’s easier to identify plant species present during the spring and summer, and wildlife reveals its presence in different ways through the seasons.
I think this is very good advice. Most of the changes that you’ll make early on in an established woodland involve tree felling, which can take decades to reverse if you change your mind or get it wrong. Imagine you’ve bought a dense woodland and want to put in a roadway to make access easier. You dive in with your brand new chainsaw and start felling mature trees to create the route. Then you get a month of rain and you discover that your route is actually a seasonally waterlogged area. But it turns out there’s an area thirty metres away from where you felled that’s a bit higher and stays dry. You should have taken that route instead, and watching for a full year would help you realise that.
Make a plan, and update it
I think a good way of avoiding many of these problems is to always have a woodland plan. What I mean is that you have some kind of written down plan of the changes you currently intend to make in the future. It doesn’t need to be complicated or formal. It could just be a list of changes, with some note of when to do each, and a rough sketch map of the wood with features and changes marked. Crucially, you wait a full cycle of the seasons before starting, and you keep an open mind about changing your plan as you watch and wait.
Let’s go back to our waterlogged roadway route. If you wait until it’s time to fell trees and start building before working out the route, you might miss the time of the year when it’s waterlogged. It’s easy to miss things which don’t seem important at the time. By making versions of your plan well in advance, you see what’s going to be important and keep an eye on it.
This was very much my approach with Century Wood. With every wood I looked at, I imagined how I would lay the access out and the network of woodland paths or rides. I always wanted to have a log cabin, and so I looked at where I’d place one and how much they cost. Once I’d had my offer accepted on Century Wood, I started making a series of sketch maps over the next year until it was time to start on the irreversible felling work. It was another couple of years before I actually bought one of the log cabin kits I’d been looking at, and by then I’d noticed that the price always doubled in summer compared to winter, and so I was able to time when I placed the order.
Once you’ve had your wood for several years, answering these seasonal questions becomes second nature, as you’ll know it like the back of your hand. But by then you might be thinking about formal woodland management plans, felling licenses, and maybe even grant applications. Your rough plans and thinking ahead will give you a good basis for that.
Survey the site
Hand in hand with your plan, you should maintain some kind of site survey, note down where interesting features are, and what species of trees, other plants, and wildlife reveal themselves during the seasons. This doesn’t need to be very formal, but on the other hand people have produced very accurate maps of their woodlands using GPS. I also keep a logbook of what I’ve done and seen each visit, and that’s very useful for looking back years later when regrowth has happened.
Sources of advice
Your first year is a great time to learn as much as you can about woodland management. There are multiple sources you can draw on.
First of all books. We’re lucky that forestry and woodlands in Britain have been well served by authors for hundreds of years, right back to John Evelyn’s Sylva in the 1660s. Everything from textbooks aimed at forestry students to advice for people with a few acres, and personal accounts of how people manage their own woodland. There’s a woodland books list on the Century Wood website and I’ll put links in the show notes of this video.
There’s also a wealth of information on the websites of woodland and forestry organisations, especially the Forestry Commission. If you’re worried about something like Ash Dieback disease, you can find leaflets, articles, and reports from the Forestry Research agency available online for free.
The two main organisations helping woodland owners, the Smallwoods Association and the Royal Forestry Society, organise visits to woods with the aim of sharing good practice and ideas, and offer face to face courses. Smallwoods in particular runs a lot of very practical courses at its base at the Greenwood Centre near Ironbridge in Shropshire.
An increasing number of courses by the different organisations are made available online, either streamed live or recorded for you to watch later.
Over the past twenty years, YouTube has become a huge archive of information and advice about all manner of practical topics, including woodlands and forestry. Naturally most of it is from the United States and Canada, and tends to include more use of machinery. But if you want to find a video of how to put in fence posts or service a particular branded chainsaw, you will find many How To videos that will talk you through it. There are a few YouTube channels based in the UK, and they do cover things like coppicing that aren’t really done in North America.
Meet the neighbours
Your first year might also give you opportunities to meet the neighbouring landowners. Most neighbours in the countryside will be equally happy to meet you and get an idea of what your plans are too. If you own part of a larger woodland that has been split into smaller woodlots, then you might have quite a few neighbours, both directly on your boundaries and along the roadways that you use for access. The more you are around, the bigger the chance of this. If you really want to make contact with someone you never overlap with, you could put a note in a plastic bag and pin it to the inside of their gate so they’ll see it. I managed to build up contact details for all my neighbours at Century Wood this way.
Stay overnight
Finally, even if the only access you have in the first year is to walk in with things that can be carried or put in a garden trolley, you should be able to camp. Changes in the law in 2024 made recreational camping harder in England, but you can still camp while doing forestry work – such as a site survey. Camping for a few days is one of the best ways of getting to know your woodland, by immersing yourself in it day and night. In spring and summer you’ll be amazed by the volume of the dawn chorus of birds. You’ll hear the night time calls of owls, foxes, and deer if they are present. And when you’ve cooked a meal and stayed overnight, your own land becomes one of the places you live, rather than just visit.