Well, that’s been our intention, so now we’ve started. After a long lead-in time involving much thought, taking advice from woodland experts, community consultation, fund-raising and selection of a suitable contractor, work has begun on felling our first coupe of Brineddin oaks. Alex Thackeray of Hayton Tree Services arrived last Monday and set to work by creating an earth ramp and gateway into the wood (by very generous permission of James Middleton, the neighbouring land-owner). On Tuesday he had cleared a route from the wood margin to the area chosen for felling and on Wednesday the first trees came down. Thursday was wet, and his digger needed repairs anyway, but by the end of the day on Friday maybe a quarter of the area had been cleared. Weather permitting, another two weeks should see the job done and the clearing up completed.  Alex will leave four fairly mature oaks in the cleared area which we hope will withstand the gales and contribute to the multi-generational profile that we anticipate. The trees extracted are being divided into good quality trunks destined for fencing or construction, and poor quality for firewood. Then, throughout the autumn and winter, it’s down to volunteer task force members to clear away brash and surround the area with deer fencing. Please come and help if you can.

As it’s a very good year for acorns, we hope that next spring will see large numbers of oak seedlings appearing as well as the stools from the felled trees resprouting. Depending on the density of new seedlings and resprouting stools, we may or may not need to plant any new stock of Sessile Oak, but our felling licence requires us to create a mix of local oak and a few other native broadleaf species at a density of 400 stems per hectare in a ratio of 80:20, which eventually means 64 Sessile Oaks and 16 trees of other species in this first coupe after any thinning that’s required.  We also want to encourage a healthy shrub layer to compensate for the deer predation that has virtually stripped out the hazel. A fascinating next few years will follow when we will monitor how the extra light entering the wood will encourage a richer ground flora and the invertebrate and vertebrate species that inevitably follow.

We will, of course, keep you well informed of progress, but there is an action plan on this page of our website that we keep up to date.