Two years ago I went to the previous edition of the APF show and we went back this weekend when it returned to Ragley Hall in Warwickshire. The APF is the UK’s biggest show dedicated to forestry and related sectors. Despite its focus on “big forestry”, we found plenty to see as family woodland owners.
Alice Holt is one of those names that crops up again and again in British forestry as one of the three research stations of Forest Research (the other two are in Scotland and Wales.) It appears in papers and reports because it’s both a place forest scientists are based and a working forest where long term experiments in silviculture and tree health can be done. I finally managed to visit the forest in Hampshire this summer and took some photos.
We had a lovely holiday in Devon and Dorset this summer, with a visit to the Neolithic Sweet Track on the drive down from Cheshire. In Devon we stayed in a beautifully furnished cabin in Dartmoor, and we were also able to visit Thomas Hardy’s house with the study where he wrote “The Woodlanders” in 1886/7.
This summer I visited the Sweet Track on the Somerset Levels for the first time – a Neolithic wooden trackway across the marshes that is 5800 years old. The area is still wet today and was in stark contrast to the parched and brown fields we drove past on the drive down from Cheshire. The visit made me think about continuity with our ancestors who first managed the land, but also the changes in climate and land use which have happened over those thousands of years.
In May I had the chance to spend a couple of days in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Yellowstone became the world’s first national park in 1872, as federal land protected from the settlement and development that was beginning around it. It’s still the case that its official population is zero, and instead people travel in from towns near it boundaries, or camp or use motorhomes for recreational stays. I stayed in the small town of West Yellowstone just over the border in Montana.
Last month we went to the Cumbria Nature Festival at Rivendell near Workington. It was very enjoyable and informative plus it’s an interesting woodland site.
For three weeks every March, Houston hosts the largest rodeo in the world, along with a livestock show and a fairground / carnival. We go to events like county shows and the Game Fair in the UK, but my trip there this month was my first time at any kind of state fair type event in the US, or rodeo anywhere.
This month I’ve visited the Bois de Versoix, a forest of about 1300 acres about two miles from the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. This woodland is a working forest but also contains a nature reserve, Les Douves, with amenities for the public. In particular, there is parking near the nature reserve on the Chemin de Douves, and so it’s a good place to start.
Earlier this month I was on a trip to Illinois in the US and inspired by my shepherd’s hut stay in Devon, I took the opportunity to stay in a cabin on a small farm well away from the cities. “The Little Red Cabin” is on a hobby farm just outside the town of Lena in northwest Illinois, only a few miles south of the border with Wisconsin.
It was built only a few years ago and is a timber framed building with wood siding and a corrugated metal roof. It’s very well insulated, finished to a high quality, and well thought-out.
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