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Lantra seeks to criminalise chainsaws!

Well, to be specific, to criminalise chainsaw use by private individuals on their own land unless they have paid for a Lantra-style chainsaw course. Lantra describes itself as the UK and Ireland’s “one-stop-shop for land-based training and careers”. It has a dominant position in regulating training courses for rural skills. Since there are HSE regulations that require businesses to ensure that workers are properly trained, this brings some Lantra qualifications into that mandatory framework – you can face criminal prosecution for employing people to use chainsaws without the proper training. That’s reasonable and we have a long tradition starting with the Factory Acts of requiring safeguards when employment is involved. But now they are seeking to extend this to private individuals.

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Clearing rides video

Here is my first new video about the wood for quite a while, about clearing one of the rides back in October 2022.

This video shows reopening one of the woodland tracks in Century Wood in Shropshire that had become overgrown. Woodland tracks were called rides if they were open enough to ride a horse along them. At Century Wood the network of rides provides a way of getting around on foot or with the tractor without trampling lots of ground flora. The sunlight is able to get in and encourage grass to grow and we get a wider variety of plants on the edges than if there was just deep shade from the trees. But, the rides are an artificial, human intervention, and the wood is always trying to reclaim them. Left alone, the trees drop branches, nettles and brambles grow, and bushes and then new trees start to get established, and the ride will disappear. There is a stretch of one of the rides which I neglected for the past few years, and in this video I reopen it. 

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Cutting hazel for firewood

One of my aims for 2021 is to be more organised about firewood, now that we have a wood stove at home too. I’m concentrating on the hazel that grows in the thin shade of the plantation poplar trees, since it’s a better firewood, and coppices well so it’s an easily renewable source. This post has some photos and a bit more about my plan for it.

First, here’s a slider comparison showing before and after pictures of one of the hazels on the edge of the Glade at the centre of the wood, which I cut this month.

Since I established the Glade, every few years I’ve cut back overhanging branches like this when they start to encroach. The next picture shows a close up of what the hazel looked like afterwards, with the thicker stems cut for firewood, a few smaller stems cut for overhanging, but most of the smaller stems left to thicken up. The cuts are sloped to tip the stems over in the right direction. I make brash piles out of the ends of the thicker stems, which are good for wildlife but here help define the edge of the Glade.

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Cutting brambles with a hedge trimmer

I’ve written before about mowing rides and glades with a scythe mower and a brush cutter before that. Six foot high nettles, cow parsley and saplings present no obstacle to this machine, but brambles are another story. Their branches run horizontally, tangle together and root when they touch the ground, creating a strong mesh. They need both horizontal and vertical cuts to cut them up and separate them from their roots. Last year I bought a petrol hedgetrimmer and yesterday I used it on big thicket of  brambles blocking a ride: its first proper outing.

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Creating the Glade

The glade at the centre of Century Wood was the first major feature I established after buying the wood almost ten years ago. I photographed the process as I went along and in this post I’ve brought the story together.

When I started there were no open spaces in the wood and just a short ride running from the gate but going nowhere near the wood’s centre. So I pretty much had a blank canvas. I roughed out some ideas for how to lay things out at the same time as completing the purchase in the first winter, but didn’t start work until the autumn – almost a year after first viewing and photographing the wood. In online woodland forums one of the first pieces of advice people now get is to wait a year before doing anything, and back then I knew I certainly wasn’t going to commit to any significant changes until I’d seen things in high summer.

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Mowing woodland rides and glades with a scythe mower

I started sketching out routes for the ride network when I bought Century Wood but only started work seriously about a year later. Before then as the first summer bloomed I was faced with ground vegetation, especially nettles, which threatened to become impenetrable. Over the years I’ve employed various techniques for mowing the rides and glades, or even just getting around. Eventually I settled on a scythe mower which is still serving me well seven years later.

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