Ae Forest restocking on mounds
Photograph is courtesy and copyright of Forestry Commission, Forest Research, Roslin, and provided with help from Glen Brearley. FR Photo B4711
The image taken by I A Anderson shows Experiment No 32 P62 at Ae Forest where Sitka spruce have been planted in turves or mounds in a small clear fell area. The area appears to have been treated by running a Wilder Rainthorpe Chopper over the brash and felling debris to create a clear work site. Some of the mounds are under a heavily thinned portion of the site to assess, it is assumed, the growth response under various shade conditions. There is no indication of how the mounds were formed but they do look fairly substantial and would have involved considerable effort if formed by hand. The other images in the attached PDF show the mounds crumbling and drying out as well as affected by wind blow of some of the main over crop.
This must be one of the first sites to be mounded and planted as per the normal strategy employed in restocking wet sites from the 1990s! Can anyone confirm?
Can anyone name the two men?
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3 Comments
This experiment was designed to look at the effect of 4 different sizes of felling area (0.1, 03, and 1 acre with 10 acres simulating clear felling) upon the stability and regeneration of spruce stands in the Borders. I would think this is probably the 0.3 acre size. Some of the results are contained in a report by Andy Neustein from 1964 (see Neustein, SA 1964 Windthrow on the margins of different sizes of felling area. Report on Forest Research, pp 166-171, HMSO , London). Judging from the file, you are right in assuming that the Wilder Rainthorpe was used to dispose of the brash, but the mounds were formed by hand (by Research staff – took 816 man hours according to the file!) to ensure compatibility with what was done in establishing the first rotation crop. File notes suggest that the mounds were satisfactory and easy to cut wherever there was adequate peat depth, but with shallow or no peat they tended to crumble and fall apart. Comment left on 07 March 2018 at 16:57 by Norman Davidson
The man with his back in the foreground is more difficult. The late Jimmy Farquhar stationed at Tulliallan had a roving commission on this type of project and visited Forest of Deer with Andy Neustein when I was involved with it. He was a long serving member of the Silv.(N) staff, having served many years at Newton nursery where over 100 expts were created over the years mainly dealing with cultivation. Comment left on 12 January 2018 at 21:38 by John Keenleyside