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Think you'll find Chester is more down to it's local availability of oak, places like Delamere and the earl of Chester owning lots of it. Bricks were a later material mostly at sea/harbour areas especially as empty ships needed ballast and bricks were cheap.

“cage work” which I’d never heard of before, seems to be a specifically Irish usage. I don’t think Dublin’s much wetter than Chester. Is the survival of timber buildings lower in places of later economic booms? The wool towns of east Anglia have wonderful timbered houses built during the greatest prosperity of those towns, whereas Dublin and london were great commercial and administrative centres and were rebuilt. Paris knocked down its medieval city in the 19th century. And london had a fire of course.

OK. To break it down, Natural England grant funding for this year currently stands at £13.52/metre. That doesn't factor in bought-in coppice material like stakes and binders because Natural England field officers don't know the first thing about hedgelaying and they're just government quango employees with degrees and final salary pensions, Kermit the frog wellingtons and a factsheet from the NHLS (who dont know that much about hedgelaying either, except for how to promote the NHLS) which they've downloaded off the internet. If you're working purely for grant funded money you need to lay an absolute minimum of 20 meters a day. I work on 25-30. By the time you've taken off travel diesel and saw fuel (in my case currently running at £100 per week for the two) plus wear and tear and chainsaw spares you're lookiing at about £200 a day gross, which is hard to earn a living from. If you add in stakes and binders for SoE at four sticks per metre at a bare minimum of £1.50 each (and that's now very cheap) you're looking at £20 per metre price. That assumes you will lay 20 metres per day every day on average for the season. If you can't command that price as a working minimum or produce the output, or your stakes and binders are costing more than £1.50 each to purchase and deliver to site, you're basically just doing it for the love of it. And your client, if he's a landowner on a grant scheme, is just getting his hedge reduced in height and tidied up for a few years (because that's how they see it) for free courtesy of the tax-payer.

I was in Cornwall recently and the damage was localised but widespread if you get my drift? Massive in some areas yet a hundred yards away, similar trees left standing! The AONB by Falmouth suffered bad!

Wait for a space with Treelife would be my advice. Their principal, Dave Dowson was one of the top consultants in the country. He is semi retired now but still oversees things. I did the old Tech Cert and Level 6 with them and they are miles ahead of any other trading provider that I have been to other than maybe Bond Solon. Bond Solon only do expert witness trading so not really your thing.

Google BS5837 PDF. You will see west berks council have put it up online which I am guessing breaches the copyright but nevermind ay! You won’t learn to do them by reading the standard though. It will give you the guidance but you then have to come up with a way of doing it yourself. Which AA course did you do? The categorisation thing? That is just part of the surveying. The real work is in the impact assessment. It helps to work in a planning dept for a while as you see loads of different reports and approaches. Treelife do a decent 5837 course but it’s only a day. I did it as part of my level 6 dip with Treelife and you spend a lot of time working on it.

Is Fury good enough?

If I saw this ad I’d be thinking Melbourne, Australia - too far ?

Rates are simple. It's what you need to earn laying 20 metres a day finished work on average, plus the cost of copice material if it's being used. If you can't command that, either you're not fast enough or they won't pay enough to make it viable, and either way, commercially, you finish up in the same place. It doesn't matter what other people charge.

Just to give some context to how bad the storm was - we are based near hayle/penzance and have done nothing other than storm work since this post was made 6 weeks ago. Still got weeks left. There's trees down everywhere still. Talking with some customers, this was worse for cornwall than the great storm of 87. One old boy said in his 80 something years, he's never seen anything like it. I dont think it was reported much on the news upcountry. Might actually have to do some normal work like hedge trimming next week before bird nesting season 🤔

Please call in advance. Payment depends on load type.

Ham, salad and chips later!

Can you not get a reader like ODBEleven or similar that would allow you to turn off the annoying features in the ECU?

Thanks I have been googling. But I'm only just starting out with the bs5837, and the course that I spent £220 didn't cover it all. So considering I haven't got that work coming in yet, the thought of finding another £300 for the guide stings a bit. So looking to find it free/cheap somewhere. And I've been waiting for the revision and so had put off doing the course for the last 12 months but decided I needed to get moving on this so gave up waiting for them to get their act together.

Hi, I work from home so you can call any time Mon - Fri to let me know you're on the way (no need to make an appointment) or if you need directions. The chippings can be dumped directly on the drive. Thanks Phil

Residential property looking for logs to process for firewood

Nope its too big for me to easily transport. I think the drum unit might be the same as some of the UK available 15hp machines, and being that its belt drive, would be easier to get one of those and swap engine. I'm thinking it would be a worthwhile upgrade for these belt drive machines, stop it stalling when over fed. 25.4mm 1" centrifugal clutch 102mm Double 'A' profile V belt pulley 19hp 2A 1" | eBay UK WWW.EBAY.CO.UK Very heavy duty, double 'A' profile v pulley.

Maybe something like this? [Someone usually comes up with a solution]. Lane Departure Alert Auto Switch-off at Startup for Toyota Land Cruise WWW.300MODS.COM.AU Latest Upgrade: 05th Jul 2025: This LDA kit also works for Tundra in Australia from 2023 to current (tested); 28th May 2025: Click here for the installation video; Installation: Fully...

Mine’s tuned out nothing like South of England. Couldn’t be arsed binding. Someone help the OP with the rates.

I had a ****************ing tucson in iceland that didnt like me changing lane , fking great but the aren't crash barriers at the side of the roads there, just a 500ft drop and Americans thst cant drive. Though you could turn it off

Driving is purely getting there these days, no fun whatsoever. Modern life and all that.

I only experienced it for a few hours on a courtesy car and not only was it very annoying but I got fed up with it dragging me back into a pothole or a car I was trying to avoid. I have been told if you disable it some insurers may not pay out if you have an accident and they find out. This may not be the case but possibly worth checking.

Stupid me | I was the one who posted it yesterday. Must stop drinking. My apologies folks.

SoE uses two stakes per yard and one binder per stake with two extra at the beginning and end of each run. Achieving a neat finish with SoE is easy with a few simple rules. 1. Place every stake at exactly the same spacing - every 18". To achieve this my holly mallet which I cut from a tree, has a shaft of 18" so when I'm knocking stakes in I use it as a distance guage. 2. Get the stakes in a straight, or regular, line wth no kinks and wiggles. This is harder. It is natural to eye each stake back against the line you've already knocked in. You swear they're perfectly in line but when the job's finished it looks like a dog's hind leg. As well as lining them up with those you've already put in, every four or five yards you need to walk back down the laid hedge and eye the line of stakes forwards against the hedge you've yet to lay. They should be heading for the centre of the unlaid hedge at all times. If they're starting to veer off to one side, you won't spot it and you'll automatically correct the course without thinking about it and so introduce a dog-leg. Walking back down your work every so often and eyeing them up the hedge as well as down helps to stop this happening. 3. Make corrections before you set the binders. Some stakes will be pulled out of line by pleachers under tension and no amount of fighting the pleacher will get the stake to stay where you want it. Wait til you're well past this troublesome stake and the hedge is woven in on either side, and very often you'll find you can pull it out and reposition it without the pleacher springing out. 4. Adjust the stakes when the binders are in place but not dressed down. Few stakes are ever perfectly straight. With the binders holding them steady you can often take out a minor kink just by turning the stake in its hole without pulling it out. If I get a really wayward one that can't be pulled out without springing the hedge, I'll ocasionally snip it off just below the top of the hedge line and put another stake in next to it in the right place.