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Forestry

Thomas Hardy’s cottage

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.

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Small Woods AGM in Devon

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.

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Gathering firewood

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.

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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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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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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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