Episode 3 Tales from the Wild Wood

Britain was once an island of trees.

For 10,000 years, they have shaped our landscapes.

And we were once a woodland people.

We managed our forests carefully, cutting and coppicing,

and they thrived under our care.

But forestry has changed.

In the last century, plantations have replaced many of our woods.

Others have been deemed unprofitable and abandoned.

Can they survive in the 21st century?

Writer and woodsman Rob Penn believes so.

Here we go.

And for the next year,

he is taking over part of Strawberry Cottage Wood,

50 acres of unmanaged woodland in South Wales.

Oh, my God! I feel like I'm going into a jungle!

Can he bring this forgotten forest back to life again?

It is now the middle of winter

and Rob has decided to fell one of his largest trees.

Here it goes.

This was not what the plan was meant to be.

Um... We were hoping to fell it straight down there.

But can he find anyone who is willing to buy it?

Who cut this?

Who cut this like that? What a waste.

Does he have the skills to get it out of his wood?

-Woah!

-Steady, steady, woah!

And by exploring the modern forestry industry,

can he finally turn a profit from Strawberry Cottage Wood?

They cut more timber here in an hour

than I've cut in Strawberry Cottage Wood in an entire winter.

It's February in South Wales.

The mild winter has allowed Rob to clear a large area of hazel trees

in the top part of the wood.

With his confidence growing,

he is now embarking on a more ambitious project.

I've been working in the woods for six months now

and most of that work has been clearing the understory.

And what that's shown here in the lower wood

is it's revealed all the timber.

Look at these big ash trees here.

And what I'd like to do now is...

I'd like to fell a big tree

and extract the timber.

But the important thing is, I want to be able to do that

without doing any lasting damage to the eco system.

In the lower part of the wood are 70 large ash trees.

Thinning one of these trees will bring more light into the woodland

and provide space for the younger trees to develop.

It could also provide a woodsman with a valuable income.

Pablo!

Hey, Rob! How are you doing?

But having never felled a big tree before,

Rob has called in the help of Pablo Sanchez.

-How you doing?

-Nice to be here, this is beautiful.

-Can I show you around?

-Let's have a look.

-Fantastic.

Pablo is an expert Spanish woodsman who has recently moved in nearby.

Rob has ambitiously chosen one of the largest ash trees in the wood.

It will require considerable skill to get it down.

What do you think there might be of value in here?

There is useful timber in this tree.

-Depending on the thickness, if it's straight you get planking...

-Yeah.

..which is great, on the knots,

and on the roots, you get lots of interesting features.

It can be interesting for bowl making, for...

There's lots of little sections that can be obtained from here.

Rob chose this tree because it contains a large amount of timber,

but it has three stems, which makes for a very difficult cut.

-We do one at a time.

-OK.

-We'll finish one, and then we'll start with the other one.

-OK.

-That's safety first always.

-Yeah.

It will be a nerve-wracking enterprise,

if I was attempting to do this on my own.

Even with Pablo here, it's going to be quite interesting,

but I'm sure we'll get them all down...

in the end.

Pablo cuts a wedge out of the front,

to control the direction the tree falls.

It's so about to...go.

Could be fireworks now.

Pretty good, I'd say!

-Well, let's have a look at the hinge.

-Yeah.

'One of the paradoxes of woodland management is that

'you have to fell trees in order to let them grow again.'

Now, you know, we hear a chainsaw and that sounds like a demonic sound,

you know, the clarion call of destruction

but, actually, it's the clarion call of management.

So you fell trees to let them grow again and to plant more.

Right, Rob, we're onto number two.

-The big one?

-The big one.

-Yeah.

-The less easy one.

-OK.

Because that one was leaning, this one is standing straight,

but we're going to be playing around the tree when it's dangerous.

-OK.

-So we have to be very aware of safety...

-Yeah, OK.

..and not tripping, and just concentrate on what we're doing.

-Yep, OK.

-OK?

The second stem is much larger

and the timber will likely be more valuable,

but the trunk has remained straight,

so it could fall in any direction.

Keep going!

Here it goes.

This is just going to take

a little bit of exercise to get it out of there,

because two different branches are hanging on that tree.

With the tree caught up in the canopy,

all carefully made plans are abandoned.

If they are to get any money from the timber,

Rob and Pablo must wrestle the trunk onto the ground.

But this tree weighs well over five tonnes.

HE PANTS

No, nowhere near, nowhere near.

Pablo has an idea to cut off the bottom metre,

forcing the tree to fall.

This was not what the plan was meant to be.

We were hoping to fell it straight down there,

but it had a big wide canopy,

and this is what happens in woods that haven't been managed in a long time.

If the canopy is thick, it's difficult to fell trees.

It's a fairly inevitable consequence.

We just need a bit of wind.

You can just hear it creaking and cracking,

the last life of it coming out.

It's going down.

Yeah, yeah, here we go.

HE LAUGHS

Oh, my God.

Right, OK.

I can see to get this timber on the ground is dragging it back up there.

-It's too heavy for you and me, so we need a chain and a winch...

-Yeah.

..or pulley or tractor, something to pull it out of the way.

Pablo and Rob must admit defeat and move on to the smaller stem.

But even that proves a challenge.

Stop!

OK, that rolled.

HE CHUCKLES

I don't believe it, this bloody wood!

When man stops managing a wood, an element of turmoil returns to it

and that means that the different layers in a wood -

by that, I mean the understory and the big trees, the standards -

the balance between those layers is gone.

Now, it's arguable that if left for a long period of time,

nature will restore its own order and balance

but, in the intervening period, chaos reigns.

The next day, Rob calls in a tractor to finish the job.

His costs are spiralling.

HE LAUGHS

Oh, good work, Gary.

The big ash is finally on the floor, which is great!

But I do feel like a bit of a fraud,

having had to use an enormous John Deere tractor

to finish the job for us.

I suppose that's the point, it's been a big step up

from the coppicing that we were doing before to working with timber.

Technical skills are required.

But the good thing is, we have got the timber

and we can now go on and explore how we can use that.

If Rob is to make money from this tree,

then he must find a market for the timber.

Throughout history, how our woodlands have been managed

has been determined by how the timber would be used.

Great oak forests were planted to build our navies,

coppiced woods fuelled our Victorian factories.

The timber industry has shaped many of our landscapes.

And before he cuts up his tree,

Rob needs to know how it operates in the 21st century.

It's the end of winter and I've come to the Towy Forest in mid Wales.

This is an environment very, very different from my woodland,

but this is also the heart of the British timber industry.

This land belongs to the Forestry Commission,

Britain's largest woodland owner.

Set up in 1919, it now looks after a third of all our woods.

Jerry Pritchard is Head Of Sales for Wales.

What we've got here is a clear felling operation

-of a sitka spruce crop.

-Yeah.

-The crop, I would say, is...1950s.

-Yeah.

Reached maturity.

We've got a harvesting machine

that'll cut down approximately 100, 150 trees a day.

What?!

Producing between 500 and 1,000 tonnes a week.

-Goodness me!

-In fact, this site, he started yesterday.

So he's gone through here in a day and an hour or two...

He's gone through here in just over an hour and a half.

We grow the timber,

-we crop it and we re-plant it.

-Yeah.

It's a long-term operation, it's a long-term view.

But it's a harvest of a crop.

Each harvester machine weighs 20 tonnes.

A mechanical hand grips the trunk,

whilst an automatic saw cuts the base.

When they are working fast,

a machine can fell, strip and log a tree every 30 seconds.

It's a very different approach to managing woodland.

My personal best was 550 cubic metres in a day,

and that was approximately 400 trees.

It is a good feeling.

But it gets harder and harder to break your personal best then.

The figure keeps getting higher, so...

you've got to work harder to beat it.

The Forestry Commission was set up in the wake of World War One.

The war had devastated our woodlands,

as huge areas were felled to provide timber for our trenches and mines.

By the end of this conflict,

over 90% of our wood was imported from abroad.

Worried by the prospect of these supply lines being cut,

the government ordered the creation of a strategic timber reserve -

trees that could provide pit props to keep our mines open.

That meant planting fast-growing species.

By the 1960s, one third of Britain's ancient woodland

had been cut down and replaced with conifer plantations.

The shape of our landscape was changed forever.

As someone who loves the British landscape,

it's difficult not to have an emotional response

to what's been going on here.

They cut more timber here in an hour

than I've cut in Strawberry Cottage Wood in an entire winter.

The economics of our timber industry are stark.

Over 60 times the amount of soft wood, that's conifer trees,

are cut each year as opposed to hard woods,

which is the broadleaf trees that I have in my wood.

And that means that the British hardwood timber market is very small

and it is also decreasing,

and that, in turn, means that there are less and less people

who have the skills and the knowledge to manage our broadleaf woodlands.

Back in Strawberry Cottage Wood,

Rob wants to see what uses remain for his felled timber.

So he has called in three of the country's leading wood workers to carve it up.

Welcome to Strawberry Cottage Wood,

and thank you very much indeed for coming.

As you can see, we've been busy.

We've felled these ash trees

and I'm rather hoping that you might be interested

in buying some of the timber.

-Can I have a look at it?

-Yes, good, please.

-OK, me first?

-Yeah, go on.

Each of these experts works with a different part of the tree.

If they like what they see, Rob can regain some of his costs from felling it.

-I'm looking for a straight butt, reasonably straight.

-Yeah.

But principally, I'm looking for fast growth rate.

David Colwell is one of Britain's most sought-after furniture makers.

He uses a steam bending process to shape ash into spectacular designs.

But only the strongest wood can be crafted in this way,

and David scours the country looking for the finest trees.

The faster ash grows, the stronger it is. And the difference is huge.

So the fast growth here,

you can see the size of the growth rings,

by comparison with this side that's slow-grown.

The strength of this piece is at least twice as strong as that bit.

So this bit is really good stuff. You can make skis out of this.

-You can make something that really has to work hard.

-Yeah.

This stuff, you wouldn't make the rungs of a ladder out of that.

The stresses placed on the tree by it growing on a slope

render the timber useless for David's furniture making.

But John Lloyd is a very different customer.

If we cut it just above the fork there,

and then we cut it through the knot, through the defect there,

we've transferred what is actually a bent piece of timber into

a straight piece of timber, cos we've cut out the defects.

And you can see then what you sort of get out of it from there.

John runs one of the country's biggest ash turning factories.

He makes over 1,000 different products,

from tool handles to professional sports goods.

But supply in Britain is so limited

that he is forced to import over 90% of his timber from abroad.

The benefit of us using ash is

because we manufacture so many different styles, types and forms,

from a three-inch handle to a 35-foot boat hook -

which might seem exceptionally differential in size - but it blends itself so well.

I mean, it's a strong wood, it finishes well, it looks nice,

it can take lacquers and stains and it can be rumble waxed,

and it's durable as well.

-It's really an engineering structure.

-Yes, yeah.

And most people would see engineering structures as being

bits of steel or bits of plastic,

but this is nature's engineering, you know,

and if only we had the infrastructure in Great Britain

to convert it, so much more of this could be used.

-Yeah, yep, yep, yep.

-John agrees to take most of the main trunk,

paying £200 for the stem,

leaving only Ralph Curtis to choose his timber.

I'm not looking for the big stuff that the other guys are looking at.

For my price, I want to see the beauty of the wood, rather than the structure of the wood.

The beauty in the knots and the little knots that it leaves behind,

that's what we do. We look at the beauty of the wood.

Ralph Curtis is a wood turner to the Royal Family,

supplying bowls and boards to William and Kate's recent wedding.

His skill lies in shaping the texture and structure

of the timber he is working on.

Who cut this? Who cut this like that?

It's been butchered, hasn't it?

It's been cut in half. It should have been that high.

We could have got some lovely slices out of that

and made about four or five bowls, now we'll be lucky if we make two.

HE GRUNTS

Where's that Rob? Rob!

-Yep!

-What have you done?

-Is it bad?

-It's bad, Rob.

-Oh, no, Ralph, what have I done?

Well, I could've made about four or five bowls out of that.

Some lovely bowls, because it's a burr.

So, what, you take a cut that way...?

You would cut the burr off.

-Right!

-You see, there, the roundness

-of the burr?

-Yeah, yeah.

And then inside the bowl, we'd have all these lovely...

Let's get it down here, Rob.

The other guys are looking for straight-grain wood,

I'm looking for rough wood, curly-wurlies and cat's paws.

I'm not looking for the straight wood, I'm not interested in it.

What were you going to use it for?

-Well, I guess I was going to use that for firewood.

-Firewood?

THEY CHUCKLE

Something as beautiful as that for firewood?

I mean, I didn't know, I didn't appreciate...

Oh, God, there's tonnes of firewood everywhere.

There is, there's loads. Yeah, you're right.

This is beauty. The beauty here, you cannot burn,

you should not burn. Oh, no, no, no!

Ralph and John have got their timber, and within an hour,

David finds a straighter tree he wants to buy.

There's an outside chance that this one will be fast-grown. It's worth a try.

-£3 a cubic foot.

-£3 a cubic foot out on the road?

Er, yes. Three quid.

-Deal.

-Standing.

Excellent. Excellent! We've got a deal!

-You mark there to start with...

-Yeah.

With another £50 coming from David, it has been a profitable day.

-There again, another one here?

-Yeah.

Rob must now mark the trees up, so he knows where each piece is going.

And here, and here.

On balance, it's gone pretty well.

First of all, you've got John who's taking an awful lot of the wood

to make so many different types of products, and that's great.

I suppose the most interesting part has been finding out what Ralph can take away, you know, the offcuts,

the bits I would have regarded as useless and turned into firewood.

Actually, they can be used to make all sorts of things, so that's great.

It's slightly disappointing that David, the artisan furniture maker,

isn't particularly animated by any of this that's on the ground

and has chosen a different tree. Great(!)

The next day, Rob starts sawing.

Butchering a fallen tree is a difficult task.

Branches become twisted and trapped,

and once again, Rob gets a tree stuck in the canopy.

That one's properly stuck up there.

I don't quite know how we get it down now.

It doesn't make cat's cradles for nothing.

HE GRUNTS

TREE GROANS Here we go.

HE LAUGHS Phew! That got the heart going.

Most of it's down. A little bit's stuck,

but it'll come down in a big wind, and hopefully, I won't be under it.

It takes Rob a full day to sort out all the different branches.

What is amazing is the volume and the weight...of the wood.

So when it's up in the air, it doesn't look that much.

But you get it on the ground and you have to shift it, even just yards...

..and you realise the enormous weight of wood there is.

Which is great,

but it also means a large logistical problem -

how are we going to get it out of here?

Rob's timber is stuck on a steep slope.

Using a tractor to extract it will do serious damage to the ground,

so he needs to find another way of getting it out of the wood.

Come on, then. Good boy.

Kate Morgan and her horse Kip

run one of Wales' last remaining horse logging companies.

He's an Arden.

He's like a soul-mate, because we've grown together with the work.

You know, he does barge about, he can be very stubborn,

but I can be as well, so I think that's why we work well together.

Yeah, he's a good lad.

-Kate.

-Hello, morning!

-Morning. Rob.

-Nice to meet you.

-Good to meet you as well, thank you for coming along.

-You're very welcome.

-We've got a lot to get through.

-Excellent.

-Shall we crack on?

-Yeah, we're ready.

-Right, so we're through this gate here.

-OK, walk on, then, love.

-I've just been watching a machine take 400 trees out of the ground in a day.

-Yep.

So I guess I'm wondering - what application does a beautiful animal like this have in the woods any more?

Well, I feel quite strongly that

there is still a place for the working horse in modern forestry.

-We particularly come into our own on steep sites, which we're working today...

-Of course.

..wet sites, where they can't get machines in,

and environmentally sensitive sites,

but we can also work in really small spaces.

You will have seen with the machinery,

they needed a really big space for turning for the tractors and things.

And they have to fell an awful lot of trees to get into the woodland,

whereas with the horses, we only need the width of the arch and we can get into the woodland.

So we can extract a high value crop from the woodland

without causing any damage to the crop that's left behind.

In the 1950s, there were over 400 horses working in British forests.

Tough men, and even tougher horses,

dragged millions of trees to our busy sawmills.

But as tractors took over the woods, horse logging declined.

It survived only in places

that were too inaccessible for the big machines to enter.

And the success of a horse logger

depends on the close bond between horse and operator.

-OK, relax your arms.

-Yeah.

-And then the commands for left are "come over..." Woo-hoo.

-Woo-hoo.

-Right is "get away".

-Right, "get away".

And "steady, woah" will stop him, and "walk on," he should walk on.

OK, walk on, walk on!

Nope.

-Come on, love

-ROB LAUGHS

Rob has 17 logs stuck in the middle of the slope.

Kip weighs almost a tonne, but he can pull double his own weight.

Well, I feel I'm sort of in charge, but I know that actually, he is.

But just when Rob gets to the logs, he loses control of Kip.

If you take him wide around that stump, the arch will ride over the stump.

Get away, get away!

-Whoa-ho, steady!

-Steady, steady, whoa-ho!

-Steady, steady, whoa-ho, whoa-ho!

-Whoa-ho!

-Whoa!

-Whoa-ho!

-I'll take the lines, if that's OK?

-That's OK, yeah. You all right?

Listen, get away and listen.

Get away, whoa-ho! OK, I think we'll...

-Sorry, we'll have to go round.

-It's all right.

-Good lad, get away now.

A bit like my first ever driving lesson,

although rather more anxious making, because you've got an 850-kilo animal

who is thinking rather differently to what I'm thinking.

We were almost in the perfect position,

and then suddenly, he decided he was going to do something else.

Get away, love. Go on, get away.

Go on, up, up!

Stand there. Whoa-ho.

Steady, steady. Nice and steady, love.

Steady, listen.

Good boy, nice and steady, perfect.

'It's a remarkable relationship between Kate and Kip.

'The horse turns on a sixpence.

'It manoeuvres itself into the exact spot'

where you can chain the log up to the contraption.

It's extraordinary. Extraordinary precision.

It's like watching a sheep dog.

With Kate guiding Rob, things pick up pace.

Kip can drag several logs at a time, and a job that would have taken Rob

several days to do on his own can be completed in an afternoon.

Now we're so far advanced with mechanisation, the horse could

never take the place of the machines in the woods,

but it seems that in certain environments like this,

on a very steep slope,

in environmentally sensitive environments, the horse still has a place.

And, in a way, it should, you know.

Horses have been used in woods to take logs out

for hundreds and hundreds of years,

and it only seems right that it's still able to do that now.

-Come over a bit.

-Look at this!

-Satisfactory.

Most satisfactory. A huge amount of timber down.

-I think we've brought down everything now that you're hoping to take to the sawmill.

-Yeah, we have.

We've done it in a very short space of time. I look at all this

-and I think, well, one, the kind of... Whoa!

-Stand there.

You know, the chaos and the noise and the mess

-we would have made trying to get it out with machinery...

-Yes, yes, absolutely.

And then I also sort of slightly blanch at the idea of trying to get it out myself.

By hand, yes, yes. Yeah.

I'd be a shorter and wearier man if I'd had to carry it out myself.

Yes, you would. With a bad back!

With a bad back! THEY LAUGH

-Great job, thank you very much.

-You're very welcome.

-Cup of tea?

-Yeah, cup of tea would be good,

but you can't do a gin and tonic, can you?

THEY LAUGH

After two weeks and over 60 hours of labour,

Rob's timber is finally ready for the sawmill.

Some scars remain,

but felling the trees allows light onto the forest floor.

Seeds that have lain dormant for many years can come to life.

As the warmer weather brings winter to an end,

the impact of Rob's work begins to show.

The first signs of spring are beginning to appear in the woods, which is rather magical,

and I'd like to think that these little babies,

which are bluebells,

are the product of our hard work last week.

As February turns into March,

a new chapter in the woods is about to begin.

Next time, at Strawberry Cottage Wood,

Rob takes his logs to the sawmill.

You couldn't put that on the market as a commercial product.

-The world is full of that.

-OK.

He starts replanting in the area the pigs cleared...

A tray of young oak trees, and the future of this woodland.

..and learns what he must do to keep his young trees alive.

I don't believe it, two squirrels. Two out of two.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd