With some help from Nick our Woodland expert, we managed to secure a grant to help pay to fence off the rest of the woods, thank you Forestry Commission, it helps! So first thing was get a digger in and clear a path and try to pull to those invasive Rhododendrons! We were amazed at how much could be achieved so quickly with a small excavator – why didn’t we have one of those when we started!

December weather wasn’t ideal for machinery in the woods and soon, rain stopped play. So the manual effort recommenced and the growth in the plantation was attacked…

Brambles and Bracken had taken over in the Summer, the Squirrels had feasted on the saplings and somehow a muntjac or 2 had pushed their way in for a woodland feast! The race was one – clear, repair and cull.

With Xmas fast approaching the woodland looked dazzling in the low winter sunlight and it gave us the inspiration to create lookout points across the woods. We hope that these might become Wild Camping spots in the years to come.