Annual report Speymouth Forest 1951
The reports are courtesy of Moray and Aberdeenshire Forest District, Huntly.
This is the first of a series of reports written by Head Forester R A (Bob) Allison and describes the year’s work on the forest under a listed set of headings. Each forest would send their report to the District Office who would then compile a report for the whole District this then forwarded to the Conservancy or Directorate Office. This series of reports which have been unearthed, run to 1965, but although a number of intervening years are missing they do give a strong flavour of the annual work programmes; a unique insight into the issues and problems as well as the highlights of managing a forest over a period of fifteen years.
The reports tend to be formal repetitive documents but there are snippets of interesting detail and also some instances of the author’s very dry humour. In this case the report has been hand written by Bob and at some stage a part of it has been written in a fair hand probably by the forest clerk. We learn that the forest in the year 1951 they planted 788 acres and thinned 295 acres and that they had a working staff of 40 which was augmented in the winter by a further 30 seasonal men from the salmon fisheries in their off season. The forest supervisors in addition to Bob were a Forester, a foreman and two ex school gangers who are named as P Thorpe and C F Stuart each in charge of one of the four beats.
The main body of the report runs through the various expenditure heads which are not fully described but in some the activity is mentioned such as ploughing and nursery work. It is assumed the figures relate to labour and material costs but not certain on that.
Please open the PDF to see the various versions of the report, the clerk version being the easier to read.
Groups: Forestry Areas, Forestry Records, Booklets and Reports, Northeast Scotland