Oykel Forest Duchally Wood
Maps courtesy of North Highland Forest District, Golspie and photographed by Norman Davidson.
This is another map which shows the Duchally acquisitions and some of the later planting on the east side of the Cassley River namely Compartment 123 planted in 1965 with quite a large range of species for such a small area. The species included Lodgepole pine, Sitka and Norway spruce, Japanese larch, Scots pine and Noble fir.
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