Soil Survey Report on Speymouth Forest 1970
This report was located in files annotated as Speymouth Forest Historical documents and courtesy of Moray and Aberdeenshire Forest District.
This detailed soil report was the result of work by two Forestry Commission foresters trained as soil surveyors (Bill Thomson and Jim Davidson) who would have covered all the forest areas digging many hundreds of soil pits and plotting the boundaries of the different soil types discovered. The results would also have been presented as a soil map which is not yet to hand. David Paterson, may have been head of Site Survey Section at the time, edited the text.
The tables in Page 17 onwards give a detailed picture of the growth rates, or not, of the various tree crops in the forest on the different soil types and on page 20 onwards the recommendations for treatments for forest sites on the grouped soils types would have been of particular interest to the local foresters.
The soil maps continue to be of value today but were perhaps an underused resource to those foresters and planners in the era when it was believed heavy cultivation and treatment with chemicals could surmount any problems with poor tree growth!
Groups: Forestry Areas, Forestry Records, Booklets and Reports, Northeast Scotland