Dornoch Forest — Easter Rovie Woods, Rogart
Maps courtesy of North Highland Forest District, Golspie.
This outlier of Dornoch Forest appears to have been acquired as one large area but possibly due to crafting and or sheep grazing constraints the area eventually planted consist of three separate woods with wide access passages to the hill land between them. The individual woods have been named from the west as Rovie Block (451 acres), Davoch Block (211 acres) and Eiden Block (107acres). Planting was initiated in Rovie Wood, compartment 51 in 1957 and progressed through the three woods until 1964 by which time they were all completed.
Scots pine was used extensively throughout the woods, sometimes in mixture with larch and Lodgepole pine and the notes within the compartments give the planting ratios of 1:1, 2:1 or 3:1 of one species with another.
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 (in this case green was used); 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; 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.
Groups: Caithness and Sutherland, Maps of Forest and Woodland Areas