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.
Read More »“The first year in your woodland” videoThis is the second of a series of videos for people wanting to own a woodland. It’s aimed at prospective buyers but some of the material will be relevant for existing owners too. In the first video I talked about how to find a woodland you might want to buy, what to look for when you read the description of the woodland and visit it in person, and then make an offer to buy it. Now we come to the legal process of paying the money and getting ownership, and trying to avoid nasty surprises along the way.
Read More »“Buying your woodland” videoThis is the first of a series of YouTube videos for people wanting to own a woodland. It’s aimed at prospective buyers but some of the material will be relevant for existing owners too. I bought my own wood, Century Wood, back in 2008 when the idea of individuals and families buying private woodlands was already becoming popular, with articles in national newspapers and on TV. Interest has continued to increase, with a corresponding increase in prices, in tandem with the general increase in rural land values driven by rising food and commodity costs. Subsequent videos will be about buying and owning your own woodland, but this first one is about finding a wood you want to buy. Please subscribe to the channel to be notified when the new videos appear.
Read More »“Finding your woodland” videoHenry David Thoreau famously borrowed an axe in 1845 and went to the woods to build himself a cabin. Well in the spring of 2024, I went to the woods to cut myself a walking stick, and began my journey from my home at the north edge of Cheshire, to Century Wood in Shropshire. A walk of over 78 miles over five days, mostly along the canal towpaths.
Normally the journey is 80 minutes in the car. Listening to a couple of podcast episodes maybe, or some music. But since about 2018 I started planning to walk there, because I only feel I really know where places are relative to each other by walking. For me, walking answers the question “But how far is it really?” Plus I realised I could use the canal towpaths for most of the distance and so it would be a lovely walk through the countryside from town to town, without miles of slogging through muddy fields or walking busy roads.
(I’ve also made the text and photos of this blog available as a video.)
I went for a walk on a snowy afternoon earlier this month in woods on the French/Swiss border. Naturally I took lots of photos and… Read More »Stopping by Woods, in France
In this video from May 2022, I walk from the busy crossroads into Walden Woods and to the site of Thoreau’s cabin, where he lived… Read More »A walk to Walden Pond
Last month I had a problem with the tractor not starting and I ended up replacing the carburettor and the fuel lines. I also improved the ground clearance with a “pulley cut”, and this post also shows some modifications I made to the car trailer I use to bring firewood home from Century Wood.
The Drying Barn at Century Wood has made a big difference since I put it up in 2018. This post shows how the barn was built and then some pictures from September after another good tidy up of the stuff it “accumulates” – like garden sheds do, almost by themselves.
These two pictures show the Barn as it is now and one of the sketches I drew in January 2018 before I started. It’s next to the Log Cabin in the Glade at the centre of the wood.
Read More »The Drying Barn
A few years ago I wrote a post about visiting the National Trust’s Allan Bank in the Lake District and photographing its red squirrels. In… Read More »Red squirrels at Allan Bank video