My experiences managing a woodland in the Scottish Highlands
All of the land above Comar Wood is managed by Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS, formerly known as Forestry Commission Scotland). Their land extends west up Glen Affric, of which they manage a large part. They are currently updating their ten-year management plan for this area and as part of the process they are obliged […]
A woodland wander in early December took me past the Comar Wood holly tree, which seemed to make a good topic for a Yuletide blog post – so here it is. As far as I am aware, there is only one holly tree in our wood. It’s on a steep hillside amongst birch trees in […]
I find the month of November a very satisfying time of year to be in the woods. During the November that has just ended I have been trying to think exactly why this is. It has something to do with the sense of withdrawal and dormancy, plants and animals retracting for the winter. The visible […]
Over last winter and spring we carried out our first major operation in the woodland – construction of access tracks. We need tracks so that we can get into the wood with a tractor to start gradually removing the Sitka spruce trees. After spending a lot of time on planning, it felt great to start […]
Time for working in the woods has been a bit limited in recent weeks because of the other project we have on the go at the moment – building a house here! Although the main reason for buying the land was for the woodland, not to build a house, we were lucky that it already […]
Following on from the previous post about what we currently have in the woodland, here is an overview of the proposed management plan. I fully expect that elements of it will change as I experience the realities of putting it into practice, but this is the current version. As you will have gathered, although it […]
Here is a more detailed description of the current state of the woodland. (For the idiot’s guide see my earlier post (https://womaninthewoods.net/we-bought-a-wood/). There is a post coming soon about our proposed management plan – they’re sort of linked, so I hope you are paying attention! Where is it? Comar Wood is in Strathglass, a fairly […]
Since I started spending a lot of time in Comar Wood I have realised that the species of birds that are most evident or noticeable varies with the time of year. In some cases this is because they only spend part of their year here and in other cases because they are more active or […]
All the wet weather recently has at least been good for one thing: mushrooms are popping up all over the place in the wood. Mushroom season has begun! The lack of ground cover under the spruce means it is easy to spot lots of different mushrooms and there are plenty of types that seem to […]
Where do you start when you have just bought 50 acres of ancient woodland covered in Sitka spruce? After spending several years thinking about owning a wood, suddenly I had one and I had to figure out what to do with it. The first year was basically about that. Trees take a long time to […]
