I’ve commented before on my poor photography, so this time I am unashamedly plagiarising from Rosanna, who is taking on the ownership of Riverside Wood at Chelfham. Rosanna has had a motion triggered camera on site for a few weeks, and has taken some interesting nigh-time shots of a badger sett and also a visiting
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Woodland Blog
Chelfham is one of the woods we purchased from the League Against Cruel Sports, and has been the subject of lots of planning and some improvement works. The main issue at Chelfham has been to provide good access, for both future management and to enable future owners to get around and enjoy the woodland. After
Over the years I have cut and split an awful lot of firewood, but sometimes that can be a waste. For several years I had a small chain-saw mill, which I used to plank up occasional large trunks of timber, chiefly oak. I say small; the bar on the chainsaw (a 95cc Sachs Dolmar) was
I recently joined a Tamar Valley AONB organised woodland day at the local Pentillie estate. The star of the show was not the woodlands, but a Shire Horse called Jack. Horses were of course the main means of extraction for timber, prior to the arrival of tractors and harvesters. In recent years they have been
Last month I spent some time at Chelfham Woods, making a start on track improvements. This included some minor tree felling and then working with Roger for three days. Roger is a local agricultural contractor and a dab hand with a tracked excavator! Our original plan had been to undertake all the track works in
Kathryn is working 12 hour days at the minute, so I am in charge of walking the dogs, which means a daily trip around Treragin Wood. This gives me time to look and think and plan ahead. And see a bit more of the wildlife, not having a chain-saw going to frighten everything off! This
I’ve been having some fun and games over the winter, some on the ground and also working my way through various different pieces of red tape. We are planning to improve the tracks in the wood this summer, and this has required the following permissions: • Land drainage consent: for two stream crossings. The Devon
Simon travels a bit further afield…… When you think of mountains in Sicily one pictures Mount Etna, steaming and foaming over the entire north east of the island, but move a few miles to the west into the limestone hills of the Nebrodi and Madonie Regional Parks and you can still find remnants of ancient
All our woods are soggy, but holding up well to the winds. Treragin, however, has seen around a dozen Southern Beech blow over, with a couple seeming to lean with each new band of gales, no doubt their root plates partly loosened by the very wet ground. I think I’ll wait to a general improvement
The trial badger culls in Somerset and Gloucestershire ended some weeks ago, and the controversy around them still rages. In the last few days policing costs have been revealed as being nearly £2.5 million, over half the cost of the actual culls themselves. A colleague and I did see a badger monitoring group gathering in
