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.
At the end of this very odd year I received the award for Best Woodland Blog for CenturyWood.uk (jointly with Clare Mansell’s Little Green Explorers).… Read More »Woodland Awards, 2020
For a couple of years I’ve maintained two woodland groups on Facebook: “Woodlanders” (1666 members) and “Woodscraft” (1032). Today I added a third: “UK Woodland Owners” which has reached 121 members in 9 hours!
The postman delivered the current edition of the Small Woods Association’s “Smallwoods” magazine today, for New Year 2019. As well as the usual news roundup,… Read More »Smallwoods, Issue 73, New Year 2019
The winter issue of The Woodland Trust’s quarterly “Broadleaf” magazine dropped on the mat today.
I watched the film “Winter’s Bone” from 2010 last night and then went to see “Leave No Trace”, both directed by Debra Granik. The two films are set in American forests and show non-conventional families finding ways to survive.
Story in the Guardian today about people buying woodplots and doing interesting things with them: If you go down to the woods today … you… Read More »Guardian story about woodplots
Yesterday I was at the Hay Festival and went to sessions about rewilding and permaculture. This was my first time at the festival, although I’ve been going to Hay-on-Wye’s second hand bookshops since I was young. The annual book festival is about ten days long and takes place in tents and covered walkways in a field outside of town. There is an official book shop and some stalls, but it’s mostly discussion sessions and talks. Some of these are plugging someone’s new book, but others are about other interesting topics.
After a bit of an explore, the first session I went to was also the first of the festival and was entitled
“Elements of re-wilding: perceptions and prejudices”. It took the form of a panel discussion led by Rob Yorke, with Sophie Wynne-Jones of Wales Wild Land Foundation and Bangor University, Julia Aglionby of the Foundation for Common Land (i.e. land with commoners who have a right to use it), and Minette Batters the deputy president of the National Farmers’ Union.
Last week we were at the log cabin for Sunday and Monday, and I brought my computer which has a plug-in TV tuner so we could watch Episode 3 of Shed of the Year. It was good to watch it, but it felt very out of place.
This year’s series of George Clarke’s “Amazing Spaces” features a log cabin being built in a woodland clearing. In the first episode, shown tonight, George… Read More »Woodland cabin in C4’s Amazing Spaces
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