Navidale Plantation — Helmsdale Forest
Courtesy of North Highland Forest District, Golspie.
This small plantation had a very visible location on the main public road north to Caithness at the famous Navidale Braes. Planted in 1967 mainly with Lodgepole pine of a coastal variety it suffered badly from heavy snow and poor tree form. Unusually, some areas of Noble fir were planted on the southern edge next to the A9 and these trees with their distinctive colour and shape were a forest feature for a great many years.
The Compartment numbering sequence starts at 201-204 but was planted in 1967. No clear reason but possibly with small acquisitions scattered over a large area it was felt that this was a logical step to take for this more distant location.
As usual with a national organisation there was a code and procedure convention for mapping of plantations some of which survive in the FC to this day. Acquisition boundaries were edged with a yellow ink ; compartment boundaries (rides) drawn in red ink; the extent of the planting in any year was given a light colour wash, outlined in green ink and the planting year written in green eg P.66; the compartment’s serial number and area in acres was written within the compartment sometimes within a small circle; the areas where different tree species were planted within each compartment were annotated with a species code eg SS (Sitka spruce), LP (Lodgepole pine) etc; different species areas in each compartment had to be separated by a dotted black line (in this case a solid black line which became standard); internal fences, streams and other land usually indicated by a solid black line. Map scale was usually 6 inches to the mile.
Note that the annual reporting year and the planting year coincided at this time in that they ran from 1st Oct to 30th Sep. This avoided having an artificial split in the totals for the planting season which ran from November through to May. The Planting Year (PY or just P) was fixed as the first summer following planting and thus trees planted in Nov 55 and May 56 were both annotated P56.
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Groups: Caithness and Sutherland, Maps of Forest and Woodland Areas