Allt Cefnpwll-hen

[jph]

 We have now signed the 5 year plan drawn up by our excellent Forester.
We own two plots 5 miles apart in Mid Wales. The smaller wood is where I play, it is  20 acres of mainly spruce but has a very deep dingle which is lined with hardwood, mainly oak, ash and beech. The plan here is to clear fell about an acre a year and replant with oak and ash. The felled spruce will be converted on site with my LT40. The saw shed is under construction but progress is slow. I hope to have a roof on it soon after Christmas.

The larger wood is 40 acres of spruce , larch and lodge pole pine. Here the plan is to have a logger clear 30 acres of the spruce and pine which will leave me 10 acres of larch to thin and grow on. Replanting will again be with oak and ash. If every thing goes to plan will be done this winter. New tracks have to be contructed to improve access. The harvestor will stay on these as the hillside is steep. Work on the tracks is welll under way.



Here the track is about 40 yards short of the woodland entrance. The digger driver estimates  it will take him 5 or 6 weeks to complete the tracks.




Today the harvester arrived on site, so when I  get down there at the end of next week I will take more photos.

John

[Jeff]

John, what is the thread title?

[SwampDonkey]

It's written in Welsh. ;D

Something like ....Old Hill Cefnpwll(name of the hill). ?

[Timburr]

It's the Welsh name for John's larger wood.  Although there's no direct translation to English, it roughly means 'old pool of the hollow under the ridge of the steep hill'.  I've 'dressed' it a bit, so that you get the picture.           You're on the right track SD.

John, your 'play' wood suggests to me it could be part of a PAWS management scheme.  How do you fare with imposed FC regulations?

If the harvester is staying ride-side, does it mean you'll be skylining the timber out?

[Tom]

I know there's important info here, but I like the dog in the avatar that he is making to stand in the corner.  :D

[thecfarm]

I take it a track is a road?What are you using for your tracks.Kinda looks like shale or ledge?Rocks that have been ground up?I would like to see some pictures of your woods.I think they look differant than what I'm use to seeing.

[Sprucegum]

Spruce, Larch and Lodgepole Pine sound familiar to me - how big are they and why are you clearcutting to replace with oak and ash?

[Phorester]

John........, an interesting post from a part of this planet most of us on this forum know little about.  Hope you don't mind all the questions it generates.

My question, why is the road so wide? (The picture where the digger is sitting) That would be a major two-lane primary highway in Virginia.

[Bill Johnson]

John

As I've been watching "BBC's Time Team" on television, I have to ask. Are there a lot of legal requirments to address before you begin constructing tracks or doing any ground disturbance.  I would suspect that most if not all the areas where you would cut must have some archeological values.

Here, where we have suspected archeological values, no soil disturbance (roads, pits, landings, crossings, site preparation) is permitted without an assessment being conducted and report being written by a licenced archeologist.  If they find nothing usually normal operations, but if something is found there may be all types of restrictions on the operation.

[jph]

Yes Timburr is right  it is the name of the wood, our other one is called Coed Nant-y-Rhogfean.

Basically the story starts around 1945, the Government realised after two World Wars the country was desperately short or home grown timber, so they set up the Forestry Commission to oversee timber production. The FC issues felling licences, gives out grants etc. They also grow timber. They purchased land and planted it up with softwood mainly spruce. Much of this land was in  large plots of uninhabited parts of Scotland and Wales, but they also bought small areas from hard pressed farmers. The farmers sold off their fields that were on hillsides too steep to farm .They also sold plots of what they saw as unproductive woodland. These were the remains of ancient oak forests. The FC grubbed out the ancient trees and replanted  with "fast growing" softwood. The story moves on 60 years, the spruce are reaching maturity. The FC realise that it was a dreadful mistake to destroy the ancient woodland and want to return these sites to  their original conditions. They designate them "Plantation on ancient woodlands" or "PAWS".
The FC also realised that these small plots of woodland  most with extremely restricted access just were not  financially viable to harvest. The relatively small returns were just not worth the effort, so they decided to sell them off. This is when we purchased them just over 2 years ago.

More later.
John

[jph]

The photos are of the new track as it goes over our neighbouring farmer's field.  The digger driver removed the topsoil  of a strip about 8 metres wide, he then dug out some of the underlying "silurian shale" to put on the track and then filled up the trench with the topsoil. The last 40 metres as in the photo he is going to dig out the shale from just inside the wood to give me a nice flat landing area.

The photo of the digger shows where the turning area for the lorries will be. The track will end up about 4 metres wide.

Part of the 5 year plan involves asseing whether there are any archeological features on the site. We were OK but it is an ancient landsape, there was a Roman Road running very close to Coed Nant-y-rhogfaen. Large timbers were found in the river here in the 1900s which were asumed to be the remains of a Roman bridge.


This is a photo  of the track near the entrance to Nant-y-rhogfean. It is believed to be an old Drovers road. Llandovery,the local market town was on one of the main Drovers routes  as they moved their sheep and cattle eastwards .

[SwampDonkey]

I know there's important info here, but I like the dog in the avatar that he is making to stand in the corner.  :D

The dog's camera shy. I always got a kick out of his situation to. ;D

[stonebroke]

what's a dingle?

Stonebroke

[Timburr]

Dingle is a small wooded hollow or valley.

[SwampDonkey]

A Dingle is also what we call a cubbyhole or crowded closet. But in Websters, it's got the same meaning as Timburr said. ;) I heard my grandmother use that term many times when talking about the little room off the garage where grandfather stored his fishing gear.  ;D

[beenthere]

And here I thought it was a kind of a berry.... : : :

Amazing what I learn on this forum.... :D

[stonebroke]

So its the same as a gulley?

Stonebroke

[Dave Shepard]

jph, I'd like to stand in the middle of that drovers road on a quiet afternoon and pretend I could go back in time see the drovers taking their animals to market. I love being in very old places and try to picture what it must have been like long ago. I visited castle Heidelberg once, it was an awesome experience.


Dave

[jph]

Sorry Timburr I forgot to reply to your questions.
The 40 acre wood is designated as a PAWS site. This has been great for us as we have no problem with the FC aims of returning it to native broadleaves. With 90% grants on some operations (putting in the tracks ) and 50% for others (fencing) one can not really complain.
The 20 acre site is not a PAWS

No skyline, they will just use a tractor and winch.

Dave
Apart from the conifer plantation the landscape here has not changed for centuries. the fields are still small , probably most are less tha 5 acres. The hedgerows may be a bit tidier than they used to be but they will be the same plants growing in the same place. There is a statue in the middle of Llandovery of an old drover, I will take a photo of him next time I am there.

Not one of my best photos but it shows the type of landscape

[Sparty]

I was wondering about all that work going into a relatively small operation.  That did not seem to make sense economically.  Its wonderful to get that grant money to make that work possible.  You have got a wonderful landscape and its nice to know that part of it is being restored to native landscape.  Great pictures and explainations.

[tonich]

/slightly offtopic  ;D

... These were the remains of ancient oak forests. The FC grubbed out the ancient trees and replanted  with “fast growing” softwood. The story moves on 60 years, the spruce are reaching maturity. The FC realise that it was a dreadful mistake to destroy the ancient woodland and want to return these sites to  their original conditions.

Hm!… :
Strange, but we have had it in Bulgaria too. Don’t know if it was some kind of fashion, but in the 50-70’s of 20-th century it had become a governmental policy.
Many native average and low grade broadleaf forest were replaced with “fast growing” softwoods. The main goal was supposed to be increasing timber production per hectare…

Two main types of conversions (barely successful, though) are to be place on record here:
- replacing oaks (mainly Cerris Oak (Quercus cerris)) with Austrian Pine (Pinus Nigra)
- replacing Common Beech (Fagus sylvatica) with Scots Pine

Usually well growing at the beginning, the new artificial plantations after the age of 30 sharply worsen their growth and degenerate. Trough the years many of them have been dry-topped and seriously disturbed by abiotic factors – windfalls and snow damages mainly.
Nowadays the native trees species are striking back and slowly returning their own areas. Unfortunately, most of them are low-stem stands with low quality and poor productivity.
So much precious time wasted, turned out…


PS. Sorry for offtopic!

[barbender]

That looks like beautiful country- I also like all of the varied things you can learn on here.

[jph]

  I am back from 5 days in Wales. Work is progressing well. The harvestor has cut what he can reach from the new tracks. The forwarder has not yet arrived on site






Here the new track cuts it's way down through the larch. It has ended up being alot steeper than we had hoped. You can just see the lodgepole pine at the top of the picture and the green at the bottom is the spruce.

[jph]

Work is progressing well. The forwarder has arrived and the first load of timber went off to the mill  a few days ago.




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[Coon]

That was a cool video.  I'd love to run machines like those.