Cost of a forestry horse in 1957
Images are courtesy of Colin Lawson son of Wilfred Lawson, a forester who trained at Benmore Forester Training School and was posted to South Strome Forest from 1951.
This is the first time that the author has seen this type of costing for a horse and they are a bit of an eye opener. Some cots are worked from a daily basis such as feed and others such as harness and insurance back from an annual basis. The main aim was to be able to provide an average cost per week and per day (note 6 day week) to enable job costings to be worked out.
The weekend labour, normally feeding the horse, is surprisingly high as this usually involved quite a short period of work each Saturday and Sunday but some travel to the stable may have been incurred and also over time rates may have been applied.
Note the initial cost of a horse at £50 and very tellingly the short depreciation rate of 4 years! Life for some timber dragging horses was pretty hard and sometimes very short. Where no sledges or timber frames were used and the trees just dragged through the ground with a chain, the constant jerking when loads jammed behind trees or roots took its toll.
The average weekly volume extracted appears very low and amounts to around 100 trees with the potential for the horse to drag 3-4 at a time on a downhill route. Again however there is no indication of the average extraction distances which were likely to have been long.
Again any comments on and other figures from experience would be very welcome. It does take a little while to start working in old Imperial money again!
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Groups: Forestry Areas, Forestry Records, Booklets and Reports, Horses at work in Forests