Last spring I had a bad fracture in my left wrist, had surgery to put the fragments together, and then got the bombshell advice to avoid use of vibrating machinery like petrol chainsaws from now on. As you can imagine, that’s a life changing injury in my case. Since then I’ve been working out what to do and getting as much advice I can including from my physiotherapist. I’m planning to make posts about how I carry on managing Century Wood and I hope it will be useful for other people who are dealing with injuries and conditions like arthritis.
This month I’ve visited the Bois de Versoix, a forest of about 1300 acres about two miles from the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. This woodland is a working forest but also contains a nature reserve, Les Douves, with amenities for the public. In particular, there is parking near the nature reserve on the Chemin de Douves, and so it’s a good place to start.
Earlier this month I was on a trip to Illinois in the US and inspired by my shepherd’s hut stay in Devon, I took the opportunity to stay in a cabin on a small farm well away from the cities. “The Little Red Cabin” is on a hobby farm just outside the town of Lena in northwest Illinois, only a few miles south of the border with Wisconsin.
It was built only a few years ago and is a timber framed building with wood siding and a corrugated metal roof. It’s very well insulated, finished to a high quality, and well thought-out.
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.
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
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 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 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.
