8 February 2013

Massive goalposts!

What have massive goalposts got to do with woodlands I hear you ask.......

In the South Lakes woodland we are often moving large loads of timber around which means large machines, either our forwarder working in the woods or timber wagons collecting timber and taking it to sawmills around the country. Where extraction routes pass under power lines we use goalposts to warn drivers so they don't crash into powerlines with their timber cranes and black out large parts of the Lake District!

Craig cutting a pipe.
In this case we had to use large concrete pipes to hold the uprights as we couldn't dig holes because of bedrock.

1-0 to the rangers, Goalposts finished.
The heavy snow a couple of weeks ago brought down a lot of branches mostly from oak trees which meant that the whole ranger (and footpath) team split up to clear up what we could from roads and footpaths, even with all that manpopwer it still took 2 full days and the forestry team are still dealing with loads of braches stuck or hanging up trees.

Damage to an oak on the shore of Windermere.
With all the melting snow becks have been very full and in some cases have flooded.  One of our farm tenants asked if we could do something to stop his fields flooding and getting covered with gravel from the beck.
 
Sycamore tree diverting the beck across the field.
An afternoon spent with a chainsaw and mini digger solved the problem (we hope!)  We cut one of the offending limbs back which allowed some gentle digging to deepen the beck, the material we dug out was then used to create a bank to stop the flooding across the field.

Digging out the beck.
 
Work finished hopefully the beck will stay in its channel.
 

Richard Tanner
Ranger - Woodland

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