FORESTRY
OPERATIONS
Then and now....
Over two
hundred years ago, Australia was opened up for settlement by the convict and
pioneer timber getters. By burning and ring-barking they cleared the land and
penetrating the dense forests they felled huge trees for timber.
An enormous Mountain Ash(Eucalyptus regnans,) the tallest
flowering tree on Earth, growing to 90m. Note the slots in the stump where the timber getters wedged planks to stand on while sawing through the trunk.
The trunks were cut to length and taken to the sawpits
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| Log in place over sawpit (note saw in place.) |
From my notes: “now hidden in the undergrowth, these sawpits always evoke visions
of fearful toil; think of the heat, the flies, the sawdust raining down on the
lower sawyer. The thirst, the pressure of getting the day’s quota done.... the
Heartbreak Track ran down into deep gullies and up the other side. Heartbreak
indeed for the bullock teams used to drag the timbers to the timber mill in the
valley below.”
Now.... commercial forestry in Britain and
Europe is a fully mechanized industry. Mainly coniferous plantations are grown
and harvested in blocks.
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Timber from clear-fell sorted and stacked to be taken to sawmill.
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Mechanized timber-handling. Note some in background has already been planked on site.
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Cornwall
is among the least wooded areas of Britain with only 11% tree cover compared
with an average of 13% over the whole of Britain and
37% on the Continent. In East
Cornwall the numerous deep valleys have long been wooded, traditionally
Oak, but the policy of the Forestry
Commission some 60 and more years ago was to fell these woods apart from a strip alongside their valley
-bottom rivers and streams, and to plant them with various species of conifers.
This followed a lot of planting of conifers in big blocks on the moors and the
heathy, uncultivated ridges between the river systems. The plants such as heather,
gorse and whortleberry growing in the better light in tracksides and cleared
areas in these places, are long-enduring evidence of the previous heathland
habitat.
Economics
and a more enlightened philosophy are leading in some places to the felling of
marketable conifers and then replanting on occasion with broad-leaved species,
or at least a bordering fringe surrounding further coniferous re-planting.
A walk in the forestry. From
note a few years ago: we were
driven by curiosity about the recent planting in cleared woodland near home. We
walked down the valley which is drained by a stream fed by numerous springs and
freshets along its length.
There are several
named woods in this valley and they comprise blocks of different ages and
different species of conifer.
The valley bottom
hasn’t been planted up and is a chaos
of fallen and bent moss-covered trunks and branches of oak, ash, willow and
hazel. In the thick soggy leaf mould we saw bright orange cups of the Orange
Peel Fungus
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Orange Peel Or Coral-Cup Fungus
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Going down the right-hand side of the valley in Watergate Wood we soon came to
a steep area recently clear-felled, with the brushwood rolled up into windrows,
ready for re-planting.
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Herb-rich grassland,planted, clear-felled & ready for re-planting all within 40 years.
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We knew this slope back in the ‘90s
when it was lovely flower-rich unimproved grassland. We were disappointed to
see a few years later it had been planted with conifers. Now we have come full
circle and they have been cut down. Their tree rings confirmed they were about
thirty years old.
On then through
Sturts Wood, a mature stand of Western Red Cedar, with bare ground beneath
their fluted trunks. The hushed silence there only broken by the mewing calls
of a pair of Buzzards circling in the blue sky above
Where the valley
joined the Launceston road we came to a re-planted area. Young Oaks and Sweet
Chestnut are protected by tall tree-guards; they have replaced a thirty-year
old stand of Larches.
We followed back
up the stream on the other side of the valley, passing stands of Douglas Fir,
and Sitka and Norway Spruces, the ground below strewn with fallen cones. We’ll
have to wait until it’s their turn for felling before we can count their age.
Returning to the car through what the map calls Holwood Coppice, we had stopped
to admire an overwintered Red Admiral, basking in a patch of warm sunlight,
when a Woodcock got up from the wet track ahead and flew off among the trees.
Clear-felling
by chain saw and machinery for handling the felled trees is now normal practice
but now and then the old less invasive practice of felling of selected trees is
used. In the late ‘80s we saw horses being used in the timber camps in beech
forests in Jugoslavia (this was soon after Tito died and before Jugoslavia
bloodily disintegrated into its member states) we noted “
Ate lunch resting under a tree; a string of mules stopped to drink at a long trough carved out
of a tree trunk. Clear water was running into it from a pipe sticking out of
the hillside. When we filled our water bottles we saw several dark little toads
with bright orange bellies in the trough. The mules were loaded with side
panniers full of 2 to 3-foot long logs of firewood. A couple of men sat on
their ponies nearby. They looked like bandits. We have seen in the middle of
the towns round here that people have loads of these lengths of firewood
delivered outside the house, then men with mobile saw-benches come and cut it
into shorter lengths.
Higher up, beyond the
foresters’ camp in the beech forest we turned up the left fork of the track and
passed the woodmen eating their lunch. Their horses were tucking into their
nosebags. They are big heavy horses with long swishing tails. They’d been
pulling great logs down onto the track for the lorries to take them to the
sawmill at Krasno in the valley below.”
A few years
later, Prince Charles, Duke of Cornwall, who takes a special interest in the
woodland valley around Luckett here in East Cornwall arranged for a horse team
to clear the Douglas Firs from a very steep little side valley. This team was
an Irish father and sons from Cumbria with their pair of Ardennes horses. They
extracted the felled trunks with clinical precision on a steep valley side on
ground which was very difficult of access to modern machinery. The horse towing
the long log delicately negotiated stumps, easing back and adjusting his
pulling angle when impeded, with a minimum of instruction and fuss. It was
fascinating to watch. The logs were pulled out to a track where they could then
be loaded onto a trailer to take them to the main lorry pick-up point.
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Unhitching log just pulled down-slope.
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The horse-drawn forewarder which will take logs down to the lorry pick-up point.
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Waiting for the next job.
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From my notes Jan.’13
“We
were told they are using horses in the timber work in the woods in the valley
so we went to see.
An Irishman and his two sons were
clear-felling a patch of fir trees beyond the stream gully to the east of the
Ridge meadows. It is a steepish slope and we looked across from the track
curving away round the end of the next ridge, above the stream. Two men were
standing talking, another was chain-sawing trunks into lengths of about eight
foot, and two horses were standing patiently under the trees at the edge of the
cleared ground.
A trailer with a grab on it was
being driven down the track by a tractor. The trailer was loaded with the eight
foot lengths, and being taken to the stack further down where a lorry will take
them away some time.
Then one of the sons went over and
taking one of the horses, attached a rope to the end of a trunk, and the horse
pulled it down the slope to the middle of the clearing among the sawn lengths.
He pulled two or three down like this, picking his way nimbly through and over
the tangle of brash and stumps, on his own, controlled by shouts of ‘Whoa!’ and
encouragement as the trunk slid down the slope or hitched up on snags.
A bit later, he took both horses
down to a four-wheeled trailer (a forewarder), again with a hydraulic grab on it and a light
engine behind a sort of chariot platform at the front, with control levers. The
horses stood quietly to one side, waiting to be backed between the shafts of
the trailer.
Almost the same size, they were
impressively sturdy, with massive bone and muscle about the legs and chest,
thick forelocks of long hair and long tails, one prettily plaited in the top
half. Their backs and rumps were well covered with thick grey-roan coats; at
first glance it was as if they had woollen blankets. The one nearer us we were
told at some stage was 13, belonging to the father and the other, a 4 year-old,
was owned by the son who was hitching them up. They are 15.1 and 15 hands
respectively and are from the Ardennes. Working the woods was “In their blood”
the father told me. “Generation after generation of them.” These were both
stallions and they have two mares as well.
All hitched and the engine on the forewarder
running, for brakes rather than driving power, they were off with a twitch of
the reins and a shout, turning and then hauling up the slope in a mess of stone
and mud, down to the stream, across it and up the slope beyond, into the
clearing. The hollow places in the track were filled with fir branches to make
the going easier. We walked on behind and watched as the horses, pulling hard,
made their way up across the slope of the clearing and stopped for the first
logs to be loaded. Then on up a bit further, picking their way over the rough
ground, occasionally slipping. One stumbled to his knees over a log but at once
righted himself and pulled on. There was little fuss from the young man driving
them. When loaded, they pulled the trailer down to the track and unloaded, for
the tractor and loader to take them on down for the lorry.
“Grand Fir” the Irishman called
it --
Abies nobilis. “ Rubbish for timber” he said, “Too soft and it splits
everywhere.”
We counted the rings. 31 or so. We
remember these woods being planted.
You may be interested in these links:
@kim.atkinson257 (her Instagram)
htpps://northcornwallnaturalist.blogspot.com
