Category: Forestry

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Woodlanders Facebook Group

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.

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“The first year in your woodland” video

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.

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Wet woodland

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.

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Snow walk through Dunham Massey

After the snow fall at the end of November 2021 I walked around the National Trust’s Dunham Massey estate in Cheshire, mostly in the oak woodland of the deer park. I made this video using a new iPhone Pro 13. We see fallen and decaying trees, fallow deer, the old brick slaughterhouse tower, ducks in the moat in front of the House.

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Forests of Dune

The release of Denis Villeneuve’s wonderful film of the first half of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” has coincided with the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, but few reviewers have made the connection because the book’s ecological themes are largely absent from the screen version.

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Off Grid Toilet at Century Wood

The toilet shed was the first building I put up at the wood, way back in 2009. This post talks through the original design with photos I took at the time. All before it was ever used in case you’re worried 🙂 In short, it’s an off grid composting toilet set up with separate chambers and seats for liquids vs solids+liquids.

I based the building on a shed kit from Tiger Sheds. It’s an 8ft by 6ft apex shed which cost £248 in 2009. Since 2009 the average price rise across the economy has only been about 30%, but timber has sky rocketed. The equivalent shed now costs over £700!

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Summer firewood at Century Wood

One of the attractive features of coppice selection is that you can do it at any time of the year. It’s even less seasonal than traditional “simple coppicing” where you fell a whole coup at a time, since you’re leaving the smaller stems, and their leaves, in place to thicken up in future years. In either case, checking for birds nests in spring and summer is a lot more reliable with these smaller trees than when felling big mature standards.

This photo shows some logs from a small elm that I’m about to cart off to the Barn for splitting and stacking. In the background, on the left is the base of a hazel that I’d harvested already. On the right you can see a rotten, shaded out plantation poplar that I took down for safety as it was right on the edge of the ride, but I left the trunk on the ground as deadwood.

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Visiting Northdown Plantation

Last month I attended the RFS “intermediate level silviculture” one day course run by Julian Evans at his wood, Northdown Plantation, near Overton in Hampshire. I read his book “A wood of our own” in October 2007 before I bought Century Wood, and it was part of my decision to buy a wood. I’ve said before that it’s “the book I compare other woodland owners’ books against”. So it was very special to finally visit the wood itself.

There were two dozen of us there on the day: a mixture of small woodland owners like me; staff of wildlife trusts, the National Trust, and Windsor Great Park; and independent forestry consultants. The RFS helpfully provide Continuing Professional Development certificates for courses like this to people who need them.

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Book hunting at the Shropshire Outdoor Show

At the weekend we went to the Shropshire Outdoor Show at Whittington Castle near Oswestry. The show is now in its second year and thankfully was able to go ahead despite the pandemic. Two dozen stands with a mixture of bushcraft, traditional crafts, and demonstrations like archery. A strong and lovely smell of wood smoke too. During the afternoon I came across a classic book on forestry, but more of that later.

The location of Whttington Castle is another of Shropshire’s hidden gems. The castle is operated by a charitable preservation trust on a 99 year lease, and they have done a lot of conservation work on the fabric of the buildings. As well as a beautiful place to visit, they also host reenactment events and regular car boots sales.

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