Yesterday was another visit with the unexpected. I planned to do more brushcutting but having had a hectic and stressful week, decided just to go and relax a little, play in the woods and build a fireplace next to my work area where my bench and seat are. This will be the third fire location, one being at my camping area (mainly used in summer) and the other at my shelter (winter). This one will be for small quick fires when I want to make coffee the bushcraft way and get a bit of a warm when it’s very cold.

Arriving around 8.30 I decided to start off with a walk around the wider woods. I could smell a vague hint of woodsmoke and wondered who was already there enjoying a fire. I checked a couple of the other sites  but found no-one. I could see bluish smoke further way to the edge of the woods so decided to head there, purely out of curiosity. When I got there, a smouldering fire was burning in the undergrowth and had covered an area about 50 square metres. It was clearly a wild fire, not intentional and small flames kept breaking out as the breeze fanned it onto the dead bracken and pine needles. I knew who the owner was an rang him and waited till he arrived with water. It hardly made an impact and he was going to have to make several trips with more. I’m not sure whether an intruder had started it or the owner had previously had a small fire which he thought he had extinguished but had kept burning below the surface. His plot being mainly pine, has a thick layer of pine needles which are resinous and can smoulder below the surface and keep going for days. A good job it wasn’t summer and much drier or it could have been very severe.

Half the morning had gone by the time I got back to mine. Some of the neighbours arrived and it was good to just socialise for a while. One of them lit their own fire and I joked that we could have just gone around to the wild fire for a warm up. The main tasks for the day were to build my new fire and try lighting  it using the birch bark scrapings technique much loved by bushcrafters. I wanted my fireplace to be raised off the ground so that the heat would be more aligned to my body when sitting and also involve less bending when lighting etc. 

I placed some building blocks as legs and balanced a small concrete slab across it with two bricks as side walls which will also support a wire mesh for grilling. It was functional but looked too rigid and unnatural. I spent about an hour rearranging it, trying to hide the blocks, using the limestone rocks I dug up a few months ago. I’m not 100% happy with the look of it but for now it will suffice.

I went foraging for birch bark and found some nice pieces on some fallen trees. For fuel I collected small dead twigs that had fallen from above and lodged in the lower branches. These are best as they tend to be dry. I stored some in an old dustbin to keep dry for later fires. The technique of starting a flame is to lay the bark flat, shielding it from breezes. Then using a sharp knife, scrape the surface hard until you create a small pile of fine shavings. The bark contains a lot of volatile oils and will take a spark from a ferro rod (firesteel) and produce a small flame which can then be fed with dry tinder, thin bark peelings etc and by slowly adding twigs, build into a sustainable fire. Here’s my inaugural fire.

That was pretty much all the work I did but it’s good just to go and enjoy being there and playing like a ten year-old.

I’m late with this post due to nasty DIY jobs at home which are pressing and time consuming. It was last Saturday when I went to the woods. I decided to continue with the bramble brush cutting, clearing the areas that had regrown from last year and making better access to some trees that I want to fell this winter. As usual I had a walkabout first. Even after three and a half years, there is still an area I really don’t know very well. It’s right in the centre of the lower half and there is no reason to go into it because it’s not a target for any work yet and quite brambly. Well just for the hell of it I waded in. I found the scattered remains of what was probably a wood pigeon. I don’t know what predated it but guessing it was a buzzard. No sign of the carcass, just wings and feathers.

I erected some deer netting around a couple of healthy young hazel trees that had been donated by a friend in spring. Doing really well but looking quite tasty to a hungry roe deer and standing out like a sore thumb where I’ve cut the bramble back.

I noticed this harlequin ladybird on the top of the hazel. They are a non-native species from Asia and killing off a lot of our native ones. They are much bigger and apparently eat ours. Can you spot another small predator on the same twig? It’s so well disguised it took a while for me to notice it.

I covered a fair bit of area with the brushcutter, you can see what a difference it makes to the woodand floor compared to the bramble in the background. It looks severe now but the bluebells and wood anemones will love the extra light in Spring and hopefully other ground cover plants will take advantage too.

I had a nice surprise this week. The Woodland Trust are writing a fairly large article about their Heritage Lottery project for PAWS woodland owners that is ending soon. It will go in their next quarterly magazine. They were pleased with the filming they did with me and wanted to include some of the material in the magazine. I had a long conversation with a very nice lady about my work here and it looks like my fame as a woodland is spreading! It’s a nice compliment and am looking forward to seeing the article. Hoping to go again on Sunday and bash some more bramble.

Yesterday’s visit showed the woods at it’s Autumn’s best. The beech trees in particular are beautiful with their multi-coloured leaves. The weather was still, the low sun just skimming through the trees and the woods felt calm and quiet. I felt grateful to have all this.

I planned to do some serious work. First clearing up the remaining brash from the trees I felled last week, then attacking the rampant bramble with the brushcutter. Some areas that I previously cut had regrown to a point where they were taking over the ground again.

The brash needed some hefty muscle work to pull it out of the elder tree it had fallen into. I dragged it over to the dead hedge behind the logshed and wove it into place. It’s nice and dense now and hopefully home to a robin or blackbird nest next year. I paused for a few seconds and was rewarded by the appearance of a tiny wren. It was clearly checking me out as it flew closer and closer, finally landing sideways on a tree a metre away. Unusual for them to get so close. I wondered if it was because it was purely a woodland inhabitant and had no inbuilt fear of humans because it had no reason to – no past experiences of being predated by us. Perhaps it saw me as just another woodland creature. That felt good, a huge compliment.

Brushcutting is very hard work on the back and feels quite brutal to the woods. I’ve done a lot of bramble pulling this year, which is preferable as you can usually get the roots out too but these areas are too big to do that way. Using the machine means I can reduce the heavy bulk quickly and hopefully weaken the plants, slowing down regrowth. I hadn’t used the machine for almost a year but it fired up straight away. I prioritised the areas to cut and started around the camp area, moving on down the strip where I have cleared before and planted saplings. By the end of the day I had made a significant inroad which I shall continue with next time.

I’ll end with a photo of a lovely, gnarly old hawthorn tree

Well where did Summer go so fast? The clocks have gone back to GMT and for me, that signals the end of summer, light nights and the closing down of Mother Nature for a few months. Still there is plenty of greenery and new growth in my woods as well as some lovely autumn colours.

I went there yesterday to do some felling. My chainsaw’s brake broke last time and now I’ve fixed it, I wanted to get busy with some more thinning. I was feeling a bit “trigger happy” – keen to make some more changes but settled on a small, ungainly sycamore with two trunks. It’s close to my work area where I often sit with a mug of coffee and just enjoy the scenery. There’s a decent sized hazel beneath it that is shaded out in summer. Removing the sycamore means it will allow more sunlight in and I could coppice the hazel which will add interest to the area. I only intended removing one of the trunks but it fell onto the other and snapped it off, in hindsight it needed to come down. I cut the hazel down too and another small one nearby. It’s surprising how much work is involved cutting up the trees and clearing the brash and how much different it looks now.

My neighbours came and did some felling in their plot. They have a lot of youngish cherry that needs thinning. Even though young, they are pretty tall and inevitably get hung up in nearby trees. I helped them free them and they were difficult to get down. Bigger trees are easier as the extra weight means they crash through rather than get stuck.

The other job I wanted to do was take the seasonal fixed point photos for the Woodland Trust project. I now have four sets of photos taken at six different locations. Three of them are in my plot. It’s fascinating to see the changes through the year. I’ve uploaded each of my three locations to Flickr so they run through each one and through the four seasons. Here’s the link. Look for the small icon top right that looks like a tv with an arrow in it. Click on that to run the photos as a slide show so you can see the changes at each one and enjoy the woodland journey.

The four seasons