COPPICE CAM

UPDATED 1400 HRS 16.01.2012

Happy new year to you. It can only get better. The winter has been a return to the normal winters of a few years back with mild constantly wet weather. My brother insists there is a drought in Leicestershire and if you travel about 10 miles south of the Lakes you can usually find better weather. In fact we had a spell going off to Silverdale to extract the firewood from Eaves Wood because it was the only place we could get into.To catalogue more Apprentice abuse I had Sam dragging firewood out of Eaves Wood like a snigging pony.

He is an incredibly strong bloke and while its very useful for a lot of ‘wood moving’ tasks a lot of equipment seems to fall apart in his hands, to the extent that I’ve nicknamed him Desperate Sam. In the Lakes it has been raining seemingly every day since the brief dry spell in November. The shear weight of water has made woodland tracks knee deep in mud. When desperately trying to extract wood from Stoney Hazel for the Christmas rush, the loaded land rover and trailer slid sideways such an amount that I got a tree between the trailer and land rover so nothing was moving backwards or forwards. This sort of thing always happens late on in the day when you are just wanting to go home, and you need to make sure you don’t make a daft decision. Anyway I cut the tree down and went home. Our biggest paling fence to date went in at a nice farmhouse near Clitheroe.

This didn’t quite go to plan when we found the old fence was concreted in with huge chunks of concrete that I hadn’t realised was there when inspecting the job. However we survived and the finished fence looks great. A brief spell of clear cold weather has allowed us to cut the willow patch and we’ve got a good crop of willow. After a few years of cutting using chainsaws we used billhooks instead and it seemed to be just as quick and a lot quieter.