Bosty Dave

Cant do that - we have walkers in there every day so it has to be controlled down to the ground. Its safe and solid for now, I'll sort out a solution for September.

Looking at it again this morning I've got two decent trees to winch from - 1 is straight ahead, 1 is at 90 deg, just need to get a drone up and see how well stuck it is up top.

Phew!! Thanks. Using a winch was where we got to as well - there's another big sycamore on the other side of the gully that this has gone into that we can anchor from, probably 30m away, and if the top of the ash is as wedged as we think, then a pull on the bottom of the trunk "should" lift it clear and over the gully before the top comes free. Maybe. For the sake of £90 for a days hire for a 5 tonne pull, its gotta be worth a go. We cant get anything bigger than a 4 tonne digger into the woods, so anything we do is most likely going to be manual. I'll let you know how we get on, might be a while as it looks safe for now and we've got other stuff to finish before we get back to this.

Hello!!! This is going to be fun.... We own 9 acres of "old" woodland that has been neglected for the last, what, 40 years and we have permission from Forestry Commission to lop and fell and generally tidy everything up, even though a lot of the trees are covered by TPOs. We're not going to go made, but we do need to reduce the canopy thickness to get rid of the large number of "roman candles" (mostly Ash) that cover the site. There are a number of very old ash (3'+ trunk diameter) that have, lets say, "issues". One of these is the subject of this first post. Trunk diameter is well over 4', and at some time in the last (10?) years, half the tree split away and fell, and as it went it left the other half hung up in a sycamore next to it. Each of these are, at a guess, 70'+ high. This morning, on our daily walk around, the ash was creaking and groaning at the base of the split, so we got brave (!) and decided to try and bring it down. I cleared around the trunk and on closer inspection, there was about a 10" section of the trunk that was holding up the entire tree and that looked rotten and dry. So I cut into it...... (safely, from behind the trunk, with a clear escape route) It came away and plunged down and swung away from the base of the trunk, then got stuck in the ground and stayed wedged in the sycamore. Wedged in the sycamore Bottom nailed in the ground So now what do we do??? No way am I going to try and salami slice the base, thats suicidal. And dont say "I wouldn't start from here", we are where we are 20220707_144338.mp4