When I built the Barn at Century Wood back in 2018, I made sure I aligned its side door with the side door of the Log Cabin. So far this has become a short path with some paving slabs to help when the ground it’s muddy. This year I got a generator and log splitter which I use in the Barn, and I’ve increased my use of the space as a workshop that’s free from rain and hot summer sun. So now I’m building an extension to the Barn to roof over the gap between the two buildings.
Last month NASA published evidence for ancient life on Mars. If true, it would have been like the bacteria on Earth which get their energy from iron chemistry without needing oxygen from the air. It felt strangely close to home as iron bacteria on Earth are present in oxygen-starved seasonal ponds and streams, and become particularly visible this time of year, including in Century Wood.
Back from my September trip to Devon and Dorset for the Smallwoods AGM and Hardy’s Cottage, October has mostly been about firewood. I brought trailer loads back home from Century Wood where I had cut it last winter, and then split and dried it in the Barn.
On the way back from the Small Woods AGM in Devon, I visited the cottage where Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 and lived as a young man. His novel “The Woodlanders”, about people living and working in West Country woodlands, inspired the name of the Woodlanders Facebook group, and I’ve always wanted to visit places associated with the book.
The cottage is at the end of the lane that runs through the small village of Higher Bockhampton, and is now in the hands of the National Trust. It is a wide red brick house with a thatched roof and a large garden that was used as a yard by Hardy’s father, a builder. The interior photos show the main parlour which was used for cooking too, the bedroom where Hardy was born (with a cot), and his bedroom (with a desk in the window). The garden included an apple orchard, and a shed now has a cider press and other building and agricultural tools. Cider is especially relevant to The Woodlanders as the main character, Giles Winterbourne, was a cider maker during the autumn. It’s necessary to book yourself onto one of the tours of the building to visit, and you can’t enter the garden until your appointed time. You can see quite a lot over the fences though if you don’t have time for all that.
This weekend I’ve been in Devon for the Annual General Meeting of the Small Woods Association at the HQ of the Dartmoor National Park. I drove down on Thursday, the AGM was on Friday, and then there was a woodland visit on Saturday. I’m going to write a separate post about visiting Thomas Hardy’s woodland cottage on Sunday.
I decided to do something a bit different for somewhere to stay and booked an off grid shepherds hut near Newton Abbot: Swallow, one of the two huts of Wood Lane. Similar price to a budget chain hotel but as you can see there’s no comparison.
Ten years ago I wrote about TV as a slightly unwelcome visitor in the Log Cabin at Century Wood. We took a tuner to watch an episode of Shed of the Year when it was still on TV, but it felt like an intruder and that radio seemed much more natural. TV has not visited since and we’ve relied on radio for a connection to the world outside when we’re there. But this month I’ve taken the plunge and got a Starlink Mini dish to get a high speed internet connection.
Over the last decade the lack of phone signal became more inconvenient. Signal has always been patchy, especially when the trees are in leaf, and if anything got worse over the years as we shifted from 2G towards less penetrating, higher frequency 5G. I’ve found I can get an ok connection from one of the fences with a farmer’s field as there is a direct line of sight to a distant cell tower. I dreamed up schemes with a base station there and hundreds of meters of armoured mouse-proof ethernet cable running to the Log Cabin, but it really didn’t make sense financially (£100s) or logistically (a pain to set up and maintain).
I had a trip up to Macclesfield today and took the opportunity to stop off on the way and take some pictures. First Gawsworth Hall… Read More »Gawsworth and Macclesfield Forest
The felling of the Sycamore Gap tree on Hadrian’s Wall has had a huge amount of media attention, from the discovery of the crime on 28th September 2023, the morning after Storm Agnes, to last week’s conviction of two men for the criminal damage to the tree. It’s not at all a woodland tree, but I think there are some important rural issues that are part of the story but which the media have mostly glossed over.
Yesterday I took the tractor and trailer round to gather some piles of firewood I’d felled and cut up in January and February. Some of these were right next to the rides and easy to get to, but a couple were way off any of the rides behind tangles of brambles and fallen branches. Despite this, I was able to get the tractor in by finding a roundabout route since it’s narrow enough to get through gaps and has enough power to get over smaller logs and stumps.
Last year I finally read Ben Law’s book “Woodlander” from 2021. I’d read his “Woodand Way” (published 2001) and “Woodsman” (2013), and he is a prominent advocate for traditional woodland management and crafts. “Woodlander” is billed as “a guide to sustainable woodland management”. It’s a very good introduction to the subject and I think works best in mapping out all the pieces of the woodland management and ecosystems jigsaw, and giving people new to woodlands signposts about the more detailed advice they may need in practice. It’s also a pleasure to be taken on a tour of the subject by the man himself. On the strength of it, I got his “Woodland Workshop” and “Woodland Craft” books over Christmas.
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