the village idiot

Steady on Eggs! But thank you.?

Great stuff Stubby, Could you take a few pictures next time you are there? Charcoal production will get a few posts later in the thread. Last time I checked though Alan was a 'Walters', unless he has developed a nasty skin condition?

It's a nice idea but I doubt you would ever get permission for this in an ancient woodland. The soils are too precious and dead grannies too enriching.

MANAGEMENT PLAN. During the year it took to get everything set up with the Woodland owner and his minions I was making frequent visits to the Wood, trying to get a feel for the place and finding my way around. (It is a big place, and after 6 years I still get lost from time to time!) It is important to really get to know a place before you start tinkering with it. The first major duty was paperwork. We needed a management plan, and with help from the Woodland agent we started to put one together. The Forestry Commission provides a very helpful template to ease the pain. A management plan is essential if you are intending to take on work in a large area of Woodland of any type. It is basically a reasonably detailed 10 year plan of action that is submitted to the Forestry Commission for approval. The management plan not only gives you a work program to follow (keeping you focussed), it is also your gateway to any Woodland management grants that are available at the time, as well as providing the necessary documentation for felling licences. At the time (2013) there were grants available for completing the management plan itself and multi-annual payments for specified management works carried out. These fell under the umbrella of EWGS (English Woodland Grant Scheme). It was possible to claim grants for Woodland improvement works such as coppicing, ride widening and maintenance, silvacultural thinning, deer management and many other things. The Woodland management plan for this Wood took quite a while to put together. Mainly because I had not done one before, but also because the Woodland was quite complex. There were still large areas of conifer to come out, there was hazel coppice to get back into rotation, there were a multitude of ponds to resurrect and the labyrinthine ride network had all but disappeared and needed reinstating. With the help of the Woodland agent, and in true A-Team style, the plan came together. I had a ten year prescription of action and was psychologically ready to get hopelessly out of my depth!

THE DEAL! After viewing the Woodland and pondering for a few days, my initial approach to the owner was to take on the management of the 50 acres of neglected Hazel coppice (area 2 of the map on page 1). I felt that this was just about within my capabilities as I was somewhat familiar with this type of work. The owner, in a thoroughly reckless act of faith, declared that he wanted me to take on the whole 200 acres. I decided to go for it, and the negotiations began. It took the best part of a year to get all the ducks in a line. There were four people involved. Myself, the owner, the estate manager and a woodland agent who was helping the estate out and who became an invaluable source of info and encouragement for me in the first couple of years. It was agreed that I would take on the role of Woodland Manager. I would be able to sell any resource that my management activities created, and I would receive a 'retainer', which was basically any woodland grants that the work attracted (more on these later). In effect this meant that the Woodland would get managed, I would be able to earn an income and there would be no net cost to the Estate. Things have changed a little since then, but I'll get to that. My remit was pretty straightforward. I was required to meet three main objectives: 1. Return the Wood to as close as Ancient Woodland species as possible. 2. To protect and enhance the important wildlife habitats. 3. To create a sustainable and sustaining Woodland ecology. (the ecology element very much including the person or persons working or running activities within the Wood.) The first step was to create a Woodland management plan. This is a very important part of the process and deserves a post of it's own.

Yes indeedy Khriss. We have an extensive deadwood provision in our activities, to the point where we have been deemed wasteful more than once. I'll get onto this later on when I get into the practical management stuff. You can all decide for yourselves which side of the coin we fall on.

Cheers Rough Hewn. We have got baselines for the ponds before restoration, monitoring is ongoing on those. This year we have persuaded an ecologist friend to do biological surveys of the whole wood. Plants, Mammals, Insects, Fungi, Extra Terrestrials, the whole shebang. A lot of the rest of this thread will be about ecology so I'll keep you posted. Pun intended.?

Absolutely. In terms of attracting a variety of wildlife into a woodland there is nothing better than healthy ponds. There are upwards of 30 ponds in the Wood. We have rejuvenated 9 so far. I'll do a post on woodland pond restoration a little later in the thread.

Thanks Paul. Yes, the ice cream is still produced. The lovely lady in the video and I parted company 3 years ago, but she still runs the ice cream and now the farm shop too.

How do you feel about meeting up some day to compare notes. Sounds like we have a fair amount in common. I'd love to see your Wood, and you're not a million miles away.

A thousand apologies that I still haven't posted any big shiny machines. I will get to those soon. To keep you satiated, here are a few taster pics!

So, in 2012 I was perfectly happily working on Mrs Idiot's parents' fruit farm in Suffolk. I started as a farm worker and then switched to making ice cream when my partner finished her studies in London and came back to run the fruit ice cream side of the business. Shameless plug! It was whilst working on the farm that I got my chainsaw tickets to help with hedgerows etc. I started to do a bit of non-cutting voluntary work in the woodlands owned by the Suffolk Wildlife Trust and got to know the Woodland Warden Pete Fordham MBE. In a funny twist of fate, since his retirement Pete has now become my volunteer! He just can't stay out of the trees. Suffolk Wildlife Trust tribute to Pete Fordham | East Anglian Coppice Network EASTANGLIANCOPPICENETWORK.WORDPRESS.COM A fabulous article in Suffolk Wildlife Trust Magazine on our very own Pete Fordham. Some good coppicing background... It was whilst on a walk through Bradfield Woods (one of Pete's) that I had a bit of a moment. Could I find a way to spend all my time in wonderful places like this? I spent the next six months or so trespassing at every opportunity. If I passed a Woodland on my travels I would go and have a sneaky rummage to see if there was anyone working them. If not, and this was almost always the case, I would ask around to find the owner and write them a letter to see if they wanted them managed. The standard answer was a resounding No! Totally understandable as I had no forestry experience, and precious little woodland experience of any kind. My luck changed when I sent an email to what I thought was the owner of a little Wood in Mid Suffolk. He replied straight away saying that he no longer owned the Wood but did own another in South Suffolk and would love to get some trustworthy management going in there. He suggested I go and have a look to see what I thought. I was going to that area with the ice cream van a few days later, so decided I would go and have a look then. I had up till this point been looking at small farm woodlands (10-20 acres), so when I took to Google maps and 200 acres of forest loomed into view I had to go and have a swift drink. After I had a quick reappraisal of my possible future I went to have a look at the Wood. As I entered from the South I was pretty sure that this wasn't the place for me. It was shortly after a conifer extraction and the place looked like a war zone. I didn't have the first clue how to tackle a place like that. I continued looking though as this was the first positive lead I'd had. After a while I crossed a small bridge over an old railway line and entered a setting I felt much more comfortable in. Neglected coppice. This was the bread and butter of my volunteer work with the Suffolk Wildlife Trust, and I began to think that this could work. When a badger trotted out of nowhere and confidently bustled it's way almost over my feet I knew I had found my natural environment.

I'll take some pictures on the ground of the regeneration of these areas, but for now you can get some idea of the power of natural regeneration in Woodland by comparing the photo above showing a massive conifer clearfell area, with the map below. The area under the 'number 1' tag is the same clearfell area 15 years on. You can hopefully see if you zoom in that it is now thickly wooded (Oak, Birch, Hazel, Willow, Hawthorne) and not a single tree planted.

Thanks Kev. Yes, it was before my time but apparently it was open warfare. Nuclear Armageddon was only averted as the FC pushed the wrong button and granted a felling licence to an elderly farmer in Pately Bridge by mistake.

That would be great! Sounds like you a have a very similar situation to me. How big is the Wood? Do you manage it yourself?

In recent decades it became increasingly apparent that whilst there is a constant need to plant swathes of conifer trees in the UK, ancient woodland sites are not the place to do it. Ancient woodland soils have built up over millennia, and provide a unique and irreplaceable habitat for a very diverse range of flora and fauna. These soils and there associated biology can only persist for so long under the dense and acidifying cover of closely planted conifers. Many of you have undoubtedly noticed the very different experience of walking through a tightly packed conifer plantation as opposed to a bright, airy mixed broadleaf woodland. Conifer plantations are cold, dark and relatively silent. Well managed broadleaf woodlands or conifer woodlands under Continuous Cover Forestry (more on that later) are vibrant, colourful and literally buzzing with life, whilst still providing an income for the people who work in them. Below is a picture taken in 2000 within the Wood which shows the edge of an area of conifer plantation. You can probably imagine that there's not much life thriving under that canopy. Round about the year 2000 the present owner decided that the vast majority of conifers needed to come out. There was a bit of a battle with the Forestry Commission who wanted to remove the conifers in each block gradually. I have some sympathy for this approach, but the Owner wanted them out ASAP and he won through in the end. Later in the thread I'll show you very good evidence that in this particular case the owner's tactics have been well and truly vindicated. The photo below shows a similar block of woodland as above days after the conifers came out. You can also see the little thatched hut I mentioned earlier. The next photo shows part of the extent of the de-coniferisation. We are talking large areas here with no plan to replant afterwards. The owner wanted natural regeneration. A bold move! This photo was taken in 2003. By 2013 all but two of the conifer/poplar blocks had been removed, and it's at this point that a local idiot with no forestry experience appears on the scene and blags himself the job of Woodland Manager.

Thanks Paul, I consider myself extremely fortunate to have landed in the position I have. Once I get through the history of the Wood I'll get into how I came to be involved in the Wood and my exploits as I blunder my way through it's next phases.

Apologies, one more history lesson then we'll get to the big shiny machines bit.? After the second world war the Woodland would still have had it's ancient woodland feel and constituents, just with a few roadways and small buildings added. This all changed (at least in areas 1 and 3) - see map above- under the stewardship of the next owner, a rather splendid but badly advised author named Hammond Innes. Hammond Innes was a prolific adventure book writer. If you are as old as me you might remember his 'ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances' thriller novels. Mr Innes lived locally and has written about fleshing out the plots of his books whilst strolling around the Woodland. There is a small dilapidated hut in the Wood which had a thatched roof. I like to think this may have been his writing hut but I have no evidence to support this. As was the vogue at the time (1950's and 60's) Innes was advised to have areas of his Wood clearfelled and planted up with fast growing conifer and poplar species. Not many people back then were aware of the disastrous biodiversity ramifications of this. Hammond Innes was a known as a keen environmentalist so I can only assume he was acting in good faith at the time. The species chosen were predominantly Norway Spruce and Hybrid Poplar. About two thirds of Area 1 and all of Area 3 were coniferised and poplarised. This is what gives the Wood its compartmentalised appearance in the aerial photo in post 1 (picture taken in 2003). Luckily neither the USAF concreters or Hammond Innes' tree planters made it over the old railway line into the 50 acre area 2. The present owner bought the Wood from the Innes estate in the 1990's, with a plan to return the Wood to as close to Ancient Woodland species as possible. As you can imagine this would involve some pretty significant forestry fun. More on this in the next exciting instalment!

In the 1940's the Wood got it's own road network. The American air force built an air strip just outside the Wood and they used the cover of the trees for an ammunition store. A concrete road network was installed in area 1 of the map above, and several buildings and bomb storage pads were erected. By todays standards it would be unthinkable to put this much concrete into a sensitive habitat, but it was needed at the time and as it has turned out the roadways are bloomin' useful for getting around the Wood in wet conditions. Below are pictures taken within the Wood in the 1940's. You can see the US airmen stacking bombs onto one of the concrete pads (the bombs were brought in on the old railway line that bisects the wood), and the fuses being installed inside one of the Nissen huts, the frames of which are still evident in the Wood today.

I have very little pre war history about the Wood. In the dim and distant past it was probably all managed under a coppice or coppice with standards system, as most woodlands were. This is a woodland management system where areas of trees (often 1-2 acres) are felled on rotation and allowed to regenerate from the cut stumps. This provides a continual supply of all kinds of useful material from hedge laying binders to firewood. The 'standards' refer to trees that were left in the cut compartments (traditionally between 10 and 50 per acre) to reach a greater maturity for timber. This system died a death when cheap plastics came in, this and some other reasons made managing the woodlands uneconomic and the vast majority became derelict. This turn of events was unfortunate for a number of reasons, not least because the fuel sources we turned to instead of wood were very environmentally damaging. Also the woodland wildlife that had become adapted to the coppice cycles over many hundreds of years found it very difficult to cling on in habitats that had become dark and relatively sterile.

The aerial photo in the first post is the Woodland I look after. It covers 200 acres and is designated as Semi Natural Ancient Woodland. The term 'Ancient Woodland' is applied to any significant area of woodland that has persisted since 1600. If the area was wooded in 1600 it is likely have been under trees since the end of the last ice age. The 'semi natural' refers to the fact that there has been human intervention. I believe all ancient woodland in the UK is semi natural as all has been 'managed' at some point. There is precious little truly unmanaged woodland left anywhere in Europe. The map above shows the Wood in birds eye view. It is roughly split into three sections. Area 1 is around 130 acres and has seen some significant interventions over the past 80 years as eagle eyed Khriss has spotted (more on that later). Area 2 is around 50 acres and is separated from area 1 by an old steam railway line. Area 2 had been largely untouched since coppicing ceased before the second world war. Area 3 is around 20 acres and is close to, but separate from, the main Woodland. This area has also seen some pretty major forestry interventions in the recent past. The Woodland fits into the British National Vegetation Classification (NVC) as W8 (Ash and Field Maple over Dogs Mercury). These are the main species you expect to find given the soil conditions (mostly heavy clay) and local climate. Within the Wood there are many more tree species represented including Oak, Birch, Hazel, Hawthorne, Holly, Sycamore, Aspen, Willow, and quite unusually for this site- Beech and Sweet Chestnut. The Wood is in private ownership. It belongs to a fantastic local land owner who splits his time between farming, business ownership and charitable organisations. Fun Fact: One of the woodland owner's businesses is Global Recycling. If any of you have Bandit machinery you may well be familiar with this company. Next post I'll tell you a bit more about some of the unusual activity in the Wood over the last 100 years.

Hello fellow tree people! As promised, here is a thread detailing what is involved in managing a large area of ancient woodland. I'll try and update it as tantalising events occur. I have made it specifically for ancient woodland to hopefully stop too much crossover with some of the other excellent threads on the forum. If you find yourselves working in similar sites please add your experiences to the thread. It is worth noting that all ancient woodlands are different, and individual woodsmen/owners have different objectives. There are very few 'golden rules.' This thread will detail the path we have chosen with our particular Wood. I'd be really interested to hear about what others are doing, and am very happy to receive advice from anyone working with trees. Knowledge sharing is invaluable, and an idiot needs all the help he can get! I'll start with what I know about the chequered history of the Wood up until I became involved in 2013. Happy reading! TVI.

Don't know if it's any help but my uncle owns a Wood in the Nidderdale AONB. Similar composition, Beech and Oak. He has all kinds of groups going there for activities, including school kids. He has just built an octagonal meeting barn type thingy for classes, meditation etc. If you wanted some pointers and were up that way I'm sure he'd be up for showing you around, giving some advice etc. Let me know if this is of any interest and I can pass on his details.

Right you are Mesterh, but if I start being silly it's your job to give me a stern talking to.

If you guys are interested I could start up a thread showing what we get up to day to day? I've got lots of pictures and stuff, plus I think I've taken up enough of J's excellent thread. Chuffed that there is so much interest in Woodland management. It doesn't get an awful lot of airtime.