Horse Powered Woodland Conservation
Hazel coppicing at Lea Wood with Harry the horse
It is fantastic to be able to offer these opportunities to young people who don’t come from rural backgrounds and may not otherwise be given this access to nature,” she said. “The students were lucky to witness Harry at work and be able to experience this important work in our woodland.Liz, Schools Lead at The Ernest Cook Trust
It was nice to see Harry grazing the woodland rides every time we stopped for a break, eating the grass. And all you could hear when the chainsaws stopped was the clink of the harness and Dave encouraging the horse with a few kind words.
Managing sensitive and wildlife-rich woodland needs a light touch – and our Conservation & Woodland Manager Joe found just the solution when it came to extracting newly coppiced hazel.
Instead of heavy machinery he called on the services of horse logger Dave Skinner and his heavy horse, Harry, a seven-year-old French Comtois, to pull large bundles of hazel from Lea Wood on our Fairford Estate in Gloucestershire. Regularly coppicing hazel is beneficial to wildlife in a woodland setting and also produces timber with a range of potential uses. Lea Wood supports a population of hazel dormice which prefer a habitat in which the hazel has been managed.
Felled timber would usually be removed from a woodland using a tractor or all-terrain vehicle with a trailer, but soil compaction caused by the wheels on a vehicle weighing more than a ton can damage wet ground and the plants it supports. So Joe called on Dave and Harry to assist with the job, which also provided a unique and valuable working experience for a group of Year 10 students studying an introductory BTEC Level 1 Introductory course in Land-Based Studies. Joe said:
It was a little bit of a learning process for all of us, but it worked extremely well and when we examined the ground after we had finished work, we found minimal impact on the ride where the horse had been working. A horse’s hooves cause very little damage compared to wheels.
The Estate steam tackled a small overgrown hazel coupe, some of which had not been coppiced for over 30 years, with chainsaws. The cut lengths were bundled up together to be extracted by Harry, pulling a sled made from a pallet fixed onto metal skis. Brash from the coppice stools was left to provide protection of the regrowth from deer and nesting opportunities for birds.
The bundles were then broken down and re-tied into smaller parcels to be used to help stabilise and create habitat along the banks of the river Coln which runs through the Fairford Estate.
Students on the BTEC Land-Based Studies course were able to watch the coppicing and extraction and learn about horse logging and the minimal impact it has on a sensitive environment. Liz, the Trust’s Schools Lead, was pleased to arrange a visit from the BTEC students to coincide with this woodland conservation work in the woods.
Dave, a retired serviceman who now operates a horse logging business, has had Harry for a little over three years. Comtois are classified as a small draught horse, and were originally bred to work in the Jura mountains, in France, where poor farmers required one horse to undertake a wide range of tasks. Horses were used extensively in forestry work in the UK until the 1950s when mechanisation and a change in the way woodlands are managed were widely introduced. However, there is now a growing understanding of the value of once again using horses to extract timber.
Horses can tiptoe in and out of woodland and manoeuvre around things which vehicles can’t,” Dave said. “I think there is a growing realisation that horse logging is not something out of the stone age but is an efficient and environmentally sensitive way of extracting timber.
Joe said as well as proving an efficient way to extract the timber, it was lovely to watch the horse and his owner, Dave, at work.
He said he hoped the gentle disruption of the soil caused by the horse’s hooves and the light that would be let into the woodland as a result of the coppicing would encourage growth in the ground flora.
Work to manage Lea Woods, one of the largest Outdoor Learning areas for the Trust, will continue over the coming months and years with the valuable hazel stands regularly coppiced.
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