That’s more like it.

This is Upcott Wood, inhabited by Marcus Tribe. He bought this 2ha woodland 12 years ago with the intension of managing the woodland and living from the land. After a long battle with the planning authorities following an eviction notice he eventually gained full planning permission to build a permanent home on the site, which is currently a work in progress. Below is the 'temporary' yurt which he is currently living in.
His life is very much in the woods and of the woods. Water comes from a well, firewood from the woods, fruit and veg from the garden, electricity from a small solar panel. He has a compost loo and is entirely off-grid. He does use calor gas for cooking but is working on ways of phasing this out in favour of finding a safe way to burn his home made charcoal indoors (as in some Indian restaurants).

The yurt is heated by a small woodburning stove which burns coppice wood from the woodland. Because of the yurt's dome-shaped design & the layers of insulation under the tarpaulin heat circulates within the structure & it is toasty warm 24hrs a day. There is no issue with damp, and Marcus is so comfortable living in it he is in no rush to move into his permanent home.

Here is the permanent house that Marcus is building. It is also based on the design of a yurt as he swears by its shape for thermo-efficiency. The roof is about to be planted up with sedum as a living roof. All of the timber was sourced locally and he has milled it and constructed the building himself to his own design.

 A large stove sits in the centre of the building. Marcus is a master at finding interesting bits of wood & incorporating them into the building, such as the twisted double forked trunk to the left of the frame.

 

This was my accommodation for the duration of my stay. Again, a tiny woodburner made it warm and cosy.

Marcus built a timber framed workshop. He makes and sells various wooden items such as oak pegs for other timber frame buildings. Adding value to otherwise reject timber is the name of the game. The workshop also functions as a space in which people just drop in to whittle spoons & bowls etc. whenever they feel the need to escape the hussle & bussle of 'normal life'. There is a calm about Upcott Wood that makes it a very appealing place to spend time...

Another structure - the compost loo. He is installing a shower here too which will be heated by his own charcoal...

The permaculture garden - between this and bits he can grow through his 2-day per week gardening job, Marcus is mostly self-sufficient for fruit and vegetables.

Rainwater harvesting for watering the veg.

A coppice coupe within the woodland. This was cut last year (this years firewood). The re-growth from the stools is around 50cm high already. He has also planted a few small trees along side to increase the stool density. This means that as the young trees grow (and re-grow) they push each other up straight as they head for the light. This produces much more useable wood and also shades out undesirable plant species. When the coupe is cut again the light reaching the woodland floor causes a flush of wild flowers that wouldn't otherwise germinate.

Harvesting firewood for next year. I had assumed this tractor was a relic of a bygone age & was quite surprised to see it splutter into life with no trouble at all. Note the blanket in place of the bonnet!

This has been a superb and facinating stay & I've learned loads. It was a real pleasure to spend time with Marcus & I am very greatful for my time here. It was great to see someone live their dream when that dream is so humble - simply to tread lightly and to give back. It proves to me that it is possible to live within a sensible level of consumption and be comfortable even if our government favours attempting to prevent it. In fact Marcus comes across as someone who is not only comfortable but deeply contented, having time to provide for himself, freely give his time to helping others, and still have time to appreciate the world around him in intimate detail.

Snigger snigger

Last week I took on a week of forestry work with my friend Barbara Hadrill of Carnog Working Horses http://carnog.co.uk/


 
 
Barbara works 2 Welsh cobs, Billy & Tyler and undertakes a wide range of land management tasks from woodland/forestry management to harrowing, bracken & bramble control with a strong commitment to sustainability and ecological sensitivity.

The work was for Barlings Barn, a holiday business near Machynlleth, and largely consisted of thinning work within their conifer plantation on a steep hillside, the timber being extracted by the horses (known as snigging).

The trees are Western Hemlocks of between 15" & 20" diameter at the butt, planted on an aincient woodland site probably around 60-70 years ago. The end-use will be fire wood for the holiday business' woodfuel boiler, but one of the main drivers for the work was to allow more light to reach the woodland floor, thus promoting the natural regeneration of native tree species such as oak, ash and hazel. Eventually, through successive thinings & harvesting of woodfuel, this plantation monoculture will be returned to native broadleaved woodland, which will support many times the number of species of plants and animals.

Western Hemlock is native of the Pacific West coast of America. It has a much higher water content than many other tree species when it is felled. The timber is is prone to checking (splitting through shrinkage) as it dries due to the large volume of water that needs to be displaced, but is valued as it is quite stable with little tendancy to warp or twist. Grown in ideal conditions it can produce some valuable timber for interior cladding and detailed trim for windows & staircases etc. Here in the mountains of Mid-Wales however they have less value as timber trees. Actually, they have almost zero value ecologically either, save perhaps a couple of pairs of goldcrest that would happily also nest & feed elswhere. In my humble opinion, they are just taking up space that would be better occupied by a polyculture of native species that actually support our native ecological systems, and therefore I have no qualms about knocking them over. Plus it gives me chance to try out my brand shiny new professional forestry saw!

... AND have a go at horse logging / snigging my self, under Barbara's watchful eye. I'm very greatful for that experience.

Some of the trees were wider than the bar of the saw and fluted into wide buttresses which had to be removed before felling. I'm about to fell this tree to the left.

 

The purple strop is attached to a winch, which is essential to have in a dense plantations such as this. The tree was held vertical by the canopy of the others around it even after the feling cuts were made and my hi-lift wedges driven in.

Safely down, the next step is to "sned" the tree - to take the branches off. This needs to be done extremely thoroughly as any pegs left can plough into the ground making it hard for the horses to pull, and any missed branches will whip Barbara as she runs along side!

A well snedded log ready for extraction

The larger diameter trees weigh somewhere around 1.5 tons. They were cut into 15ft lengths to reduce their weight so that they could be dragged up hill to the track. This is one of the most dangerous tasks as the trees are on a 25 degree slope and are apt to roll or slide over the other logs at alarming speed. They're also under a lot of tension and compression which can make them behave quite violently when cut - you really don't want to be stood on the wrong side when they go!

The drive out was spectacular as ever. I really miss living in Wales.

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Another random collection of experiences

Here's some more stuff that's been happening at Lower Upcott Farm...

Making fence posts:

No imported tanalized timber here, this is local oak left over from another project. The sapwood (lighter coloured outer ¼) has rotted away but the heartwood (darker inner ¾) is as solid as ever. They are very heavy pieces of wood & should last another 15 years minimum in the ground without any nasty preservative treatment.

Here Flora has eyed up the piece and turned it so that she can split it along its flattest plane. It doesn’t matter if the post is wavy along the length of the fence – this just adds a rustic feel, but it does need to be dead straight against the face of the fence or else the whole fence will be wobbly & not structurally sound. Having selected the best plane to split the piece to achieve 2 flat faces she is driving wedges in to part the grain.

Nicely cleft! She'll get 2 posts out of that log. The faces can now be flattened off with a side axe (an axe with the head slightly offset from the handle to allow space for the fingers when working flat faces).

Below, Simon is using his axe to point up one of the cleft posts. Only another 75 to go...

Milling timber:

This is oak too, but this lot destined to be turned into benches & other larger projects. Trunks like these often end up covered in mud as they are extracted from the woodland so the first job is to wash them off so that the silica in the mud doesn’t blunt the saw on the sawmill. A pressure washer proved effective…

The trunks are then sawn using a mobile sawmill powered by a petrol motor, the cutting band is lubricated with water. It is a very efficient way to make planks from sizable timber. “Mobile” is a relative term & this one is left in position for convenience, but it could be dismantled and transported between woodlands on a trailer, meaning that individual planks can be extracted from woods by hand rather than entire tree trunks which would require machinary or horses. This log will yield several 2" planks for storytelling bench tops, plus other parts for chairs etc. This forms a significant portion of the farm's income. See http://www.forestcrafts.co.uk/ to see the end results.

Shoeing horses:

New shoes for Joey & Tom! It was really impressive to watch Mark the farrier go about his work. Appologies for the blury pictures - this is partly due to the low light in the stables, & partly due to the speed that the man works!

He told me his apprenticeship was 5 years. The Farriers Registration Act (1975) states that only registered farriers are allowed to shoe horses, or prepare a foot for shoeing by law.

The hooves are trimmed and filed - a bit like a fingernail manicure.

The right size shoe is selected but still needs a little shaping. Mark has a forge in the back of his landrover!

Once shaped, the shoe is applied still red hot. This is spectacular to witness but totally painless for the horse - Tom doesn't react at all.

The shoe is nailed on from underneath with square nails & the points filed off. That's one corner done, 3 more to go!

A rant about the economy

... and why all is not lost
 

I began the last post with a section about how it is possible to gain skills for a change of direction. This time I want to scratch the surface of one of several answers to the question “why?”

I’ve explained that I would prefer to live in a way that offers mutual beneficially for my self and the world in which I live, rather than aspire to a “norm” that doesn’t actually make me feel particularly happy whilst actively damaging the world in which I live.

Opinions do differ on this subject, but I believe that the current perception of a “normal” western lifestyle will be forced to change at some point anyway (timing as yet unknown, but probably sooner than we’d like) due to the fact that it is supported entirely by an economy which relies entirely on an unlimited supply of resources of which we have only a known quantity. Kenneth Boulding, President Kennedy’s environmental advisor forty five years ago said something about this:  “Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad – or an economist.”

This is simple fact is easy to ignore in the short term while our teeth are gritted and our heads are down, grinding away at our jobs which occupy most of our waking hours. We justify it on the basis that it brings in the money required for us to consume all that stuff that we don’t actually need. Our jobs themselves are rarely sympathetic to our ecological life-support systems - even in my case where I was trying to undertake a “green career” managing woodlands for nature conservation, yet driving, through necessity, 50 miles a day in a car to get to work and back, thereby more than cancelling out any positive impact I might have had.

Being a slave to the economy seems like an unshakable chain while we are so busy trying to keep our heads above water to take the time to assess the problem properly. But once we begin to understand what it actually is that locks us in to the cycle it becomes increasingly obvious that there are other ways.

I would like to share the following video from http://www.doingitourselves.org/ which offers a concise overview of the economic system we are locked into and how utterly silly it actually is.

For myself I feel that the only sensible route is to explore ways that do not force me to undermine the ecological systems that support my life in order to live. Also I no longer want to be too busy to be able to offer my family and friends the emotional and practical support they need into old age, and I no longer want to be too pre-occupied to notice the transient shapes of clouds and the wind on my face as I go about my day to day experiences. These are the things that define my life, not the brand of jeans I wear or the car I drive...