Rimsdale Plantation — Naver Forest
Courtesy of North Highland Forest District.
Again the earliest plantings here, as in Syre, were 1958 and interestingly the Comparments started at No1 also (Was there a possibility of two Forest units?). The planting years continue up to 1966 and the main species throughout is Lodgepole pine (PC and LP). It is interesting to note the convention for annotating Lodgepole pine as PC and that in 1963-1965 the annotation was amended to PC(C) for coastal varieties of that species. The international seed identification numbers have also been added and show that the seed was collected from coastal areas in Oregon or Washington States.
The 1958 and 1959 areas have an external buffer strip of Mountain pine to provide some shelter to the forest crop and Forest Research also have experimental plots here. At the time this moderately high elevation and very exposed area was judged to be about the limit of forestry planting and its results were awaited with interest. Forest research and Survey staff often stayed in the nearby austere Garvault Hotel particularly during the Pine beauty outbreak and had many tales of very basic comforts, cold rooms in winter and life without mains electricity.
The area has extensive area of deep to moderately deep peat and it was here that the Pine beauty moth first demonstrated its ability to devastate large areas of Lodgepole pine in the early 1980s.
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