Category: Woodscraft

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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 .

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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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“Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties” by D.C. Beard (1914)

“Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties” is a quite remarkable book from 1914. Daniel Carter Beard was one of the founders of scouting in America and wrote and illustrated the book based on his first-hand experience organising scout camps. It is packed full of sketch plans and practical details of structures that can be built in woodlands with nothing more than axes and knives – and an army of fearless, enthusiastic teenagers. The designs are also readily adaptable to those of us engaged in 21st century woodscraft, now armed with chainsaws. Some of the details of felling trees and handling heavy logs would also need updating to present-day ideas about safety and acceptable ways of working – not to mention planning issues when building the various designs of log cabin!

Since the book is out of copyright it has been reprinted by various publishers, including the good-quality reprint you can get from Amazon.