I arrived nice and early yesterday to a warm and peaceful woodland. Armed with chainsaw I intended doing lots of work. I’d been awake since about 4 am with an airport run to do, so was feeling quite tired. After a quick scout around I made a coffee and just sat, enjoying the tranquility of the place and planning my work. I wondered how many people were lucky to be doing that right now. So much to do now the summer is over but I shall try to stick to my plan of concentrating on the areas I’ve already done work on, keeping them free of bramble etc. So I spent an hour pulling it up in the hazel copse before setting to with chainsaw to start cutting up the large sycamore that was felled in spring. I’m going to leave a big piece of it to slowly rot but I sliced a few pieces off it and split some down for stool seats. Due to hidden knots I only managed to get a couple of suitable pieces. I spent some time cutting up dead branches into firewood.

I texted one of the woodland neighbours to see if he was likely to be here and was pleased when he replied that he was coming. I headed over to his place early afternoon to look for him. His camp is very well hidden and it took some time to locate him. We spent a good hour chatting about woodlands, bushcraft, camping and the joy of collecting pebbles off beaches with our children. On the way back I met another neighbour briefly who was busy burning some woodland litter. They have a lot of laurel which they are trying to eradicate. It’s an invasive species and tends to toxify the soil around it. It contains cyanide and should not be burnt until completely dried out.

I was looking for some nice fungi to photgraph but surprisingly found little in my plaot. I did find this beautiful array of birch polypore though. It has a nice smooth, dry rubbery texture and is one of my favourites.

By the time I got back it was mid afternoon and I decided to fell a couple of small sycamore. It didn’t go well. My chainsaw was struggling to cut and the tree also got hung up in another one. I threw a rope over it and with some hefty sideways pulling it came down. I was very tired and that’s a good time to stop and packed up for an early finish.