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. |
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 |
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. |
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. |
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.
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