This video sent to us by our partners Euroforest shows one of our woodlands in Devon which was badly hit with severe windblown damage – over half of it was flattened during Storm Arwin in November last year. Some products from this site have been marketed locally and the log material has come to our mill
The woodland covers a total of 18 hectares of Spruce which is on wet ground so good planning with the extraction routes along with well-constructed and maintained brash matts have been used to enable the timber to be harvested and extracted to the roadside safely and swiftly ready for uplift. A loading bay was made as there was no loading area when clearance started. Harvesting operations within the woodland had to work round both the existence of an underground water pipe that runs through the whole woodland to supply a neighbouring house and the presence of lots of smaller water courses and ditches. Good planning and well made log bridges have been used to get over these hazards & constraints to undertake the harvesting operations to high standards.
The woodland may be owned by us and the harvesting managed by a national operation on our behalf, but the work on the ground was undertaken by locals Darren & Wendy Smith from Mid Somerset Forestry who work across the south west. They harvested the timber with a Logset 12H, 2020 harvester which has low emissions and is highly fuel-efficient. Darren & Wendy Smith have worked with Euroforest for almost 20 years in the South West and central South areas.