Shin Forest — South Dalchork Forest
Maps courtesy of North Highland Forest District, Golspie and photographed by Norman Davidson.
The whole area of South Dalchork Forest as at 1968 is shown in this map starting as before at Compartment 138 and P 59 and then progressing in irregular sequences138-164+131 (P59-P61); 177-211+216 (P61-P63); 231-235 (P64); 246-252 (P64-P65) with some later P67 planting in the high hill top in Compartment 280 and also on the west side on Cnoc Neill (No compartment number given).
The P59 to P64 plantings have moderate proportions of Scots pine in the tree species selected, used both pure and also in mixture with Lodgepole pine and the species proportions are often shown in P60-P62 plantings .There is some Sitka spruce and larch but areas are small. Notable however is the use of Sitka spruce in mixture with Lodgepole pine but most likely the South Coastal variety which would have grown too fast for the spruce. The soils of the forests covered by this map on the whole have quite shallow peat over mineral or mineral soils only and once ploughed provided moderately good growing conditions for the above species if some fertiliser was applied to give the trees a start. The additional plantings on the exposed hill tops in 1967 are almost totally Lodgepole pine however. Note that there are some Forest Research experimental plots in this forest also again the forerunner of many further experimental sites in North Dalchork in the 1970s and later.
On the Ordnance Survey map background ground data can be seen the occasional references to hut circles the remnants of a civilisation that farmed and cared for stock in the locality some millenniums previously when the climate was a little warmer and drier than currently. Throughout a wide area around Lairg, these hill and dales carry evidence of a great many such sites and clearance cairn fields.
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.46; 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), PC (Pinus contorta) 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. Scale was normally 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