Category: Woodscraft

Posted on

Visiting Walden Pond

In 1845 Henry David Thoreau built himself a cabin in the woods beside Walden Pond in Massachusetts and started the process which led to “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” in 1854. This book has gone on to become a classic of American literature, held up by advocates of self-reliance, resistance to the power of the State, naturalism, and conservation; and studied by generations of school children. Even in the UK, it’s often quoted, with its mixture of philosophy and the outline of Thoreau’s efforts to lead a self-reliant life from the land around his cabin. For me, over the last ten years it’s become an increasingly valuable account of living and working in woodland, of learning and practicing woodscraft, and becoming the amateur naturalist of your own environment.

Continue reading “Visiting Walden Pond”

Posted on

Rides and deadwood

One of Century Wood’s best features is the kilometre of rides that I established in the first few years. I really neglected them in 2017/18 though, largely due to extending the central Glade and putting up the Drying Barn. But this spring I’m doing ride maintenance before it gets much harder in summer. In the wood, a big part of this work is with dead and dying branches from the plantation poplar trees which have fallen across the rides, and there is also some unstable standing deadwood here and there which isn’t ok beside the rides.

This first photo shows part of one of the rides from yesterday after clearing. You can see where I cut off some small overhanging branches, and on the extreme left where I dragged them to the ride side. Unless branches are thick enough to cut up for firewood, I always drag them to the side or off into the undergrowth to rot down over time and provide cover and habitats.

Continue reading “Rides and deadwood”

Posted on

The cairn at Century Wood

This weekend saw my 300th visit to Century Wood in the eleven years I’ve owned it. I’ve decided to mark that milestone with this cairn of rocks in a small clearing off one of the rides that’s well shaded and not overgrown in summer. The cairn starts with one rock for each visit I’ve made so far, and I intend to add a stone each time I visit from now on. I often pick up interesting rocks and pebbles when I visit places, and now I have somewhere to put them! It’s also something visitors can do.

This idea was prompted by the cairn at Thoreau’s cabin in the woods at Walden Pond which I visited myself a week ago. That cairn was started in 1872 by Thoreau’s friends a few years after his death as something that would fit better into the woodland environment than an engraved stone. We do also have lots of cairns on the tops of mountains in the UK. So why not in woods too.

Posted on

“The Wood: the life and times of Cockshutt Wood” by John Lewis Stempel

I was very impressed by “The Wood: the life and times of Cockshutt Wood”. John Lewis-Stempel rented a farm in Herefordshire and had the wood for four years. The book is written as a diary of the last of those four years. Some people have made very snippy comments that he was playing at farming and forestry, but that misses the point that the emphasis of the book is on the trees and wildlife of the wood, and how they change during the seasons.

It starts in December with the wood entering its winter quiet time, and goes through the seasons until his final farewell in November. I do find diary (and letter) format books tricky to adjust to but it worked well here given the seasonal frame and his many short visits to the wood.

Some of the diary entries are little more than notes or lists. Others are little essays. A typical one is that he shoots a pheasant on the 8th of December for Christmas lunch, and then tells a short anecdote about poaching and the number of pheasants released each year. Many anecdotes were the kind of thing curiosity would lead you to via Google or Wikipedia. The kind of thing people now check on their phones and then blurt out “Just looked it up. Did you know that such and such is actually something or other!!!” There are also poems, block quotes, and recipes.

As part of his farm, he keeps pigs, cows and sheep in the wood, grazing them and using them to suppress the brambles which originally smothered the woodland floor. Some of the wood is also coppiced, and he harvests mushrooms, elder flowers, sweet chestnut and the odd pheasant and woodpigeon. He also shoots American grey squirrels.

Frankly, I think this is the best book at capturing the feeling of having a wood that I’ve come across.

Posted on

Five days at the wood

Last week I spent five days at Century Wood, living in the log cabin and working on the new drying barn. We’ve stayed at the wood for a weekend at a time before, but this is my longest stay and didn’t involve any breaks: I didn’t even climb the gate and walk the rides shared with my neighbours during my stay. It was quite an experience.

Continue reading “Five days at the wood”

Posted on

Extending the Glade

The boundary of the Glade at the centre of the wood has been fixed since I cleared it nine years ago, but yesterday I started extending the area beside the Log Cabin to make room for a shed for storage and wood drying. This “drying barn” has been an off and on project for a few years, and three years ago I felled the poplars which could drop branches or fall on the eventual footprint of the barn. Some of the clearing work yesterday was to cut up some of these poplars and use them to edge the extended Glade boundary.

You can see the new edge on the first of these pictures I took during the day. The second picture shows a cut I made through one of the poplar trunks that was felled three years ago. You can see the brown, black, and orange staining from fungi growing within the wood and starting to break it down. The final photo shows fungal caps growing in a sheltered corner where one trunk crossed over another .

Posted on

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.

Continue reading “Creating the Glade”

Posted on

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.

Continue reading “Mowing woodland rides and glades with a scythe mower”