Don Wood - Forestry Career
In 2010 Don Wood wrote about his forestry career for this website. It was delayed to allow for the receipt of a photograph of Don in his forestry days but unfortunately none arrived. A search on Forestry Memories revealed one image posted by the late Willie Cameron, Rogart, which featured Don and others at Benmore Forester Training School in 1949/50. Don is number 6 on the image.
Don Wood
"I joined the Commission in November 1947 to work in Benmore Forest after doing three and half years in the RAF. I lived in a forestry camp near Kilmun sharing two huts, a cookhouse and a dining room with about 15 other guys. Just after the war we had a mixed lot with two Scots/Burmese chaps, a Rhodesian, a Dane and the rest mainly from all over Scotland. Jimmy Brown was the cook.
John Jackson was the head forester with, I think, Norman Robertson as assistant forester. Andy Kesson (also at Benmore School) and myself got the job of thinning the larch on the hillside over looking the Holy Loch from Kilmun to Strone – Blairmore and even on towards Ardintinny. It took us six months and we worked on piece work at the rate of seven old pence per tree. We made a bit of money but it was hard graft. No chain saws in those days! One other job that I remember was quite a lengthy transfer daily to Glendaruel Forest which was just starting up. Here they had ploughed Cuthbertson type drains across the slope of the hill at roughly one chain (22 yards) apart and we were sent to cut the furrows into large turfs and drag them down hill spaced at roughly five to six feet apart for planting on. I never saw the results but I think they planted pure Sitka spruce. Another memory was a sudden call to a fire up Glen Masson where Bryant and May had a small plantation of about 140 acres. We arrived just in time to see the fire burning itself out at the top end of the plantation (had it burn the whole plantation?). I think that was in the hot summer of 1948.
All this was good practical experience after which I then transferred to Benmore Forestry School in 1949. Here I was quite glad to get the benefit of the knowledge of Harry Watson, Alec McLaren and Walter Scott who were the instructors. I had always been interested in gardening and working with the soil and so their lectures were of great interest to me. I was billeted in the ‘Stratosphere’ as we called it which was the 4th floor of the tower area and shared a room with Andy Kesson, Ron Murray and Pat Fergusson. Poor Ron was killed in an accident on his motor bike (during his first year?)
I was very interested in the great diversity of species and I spent a lot of time walking the woods and admiring the marvellous specimens of Scots pine, larch, Douglas fir and of course the redwoods. I was also very interested in the shrubbery which extended to almost 20 acres then and contained a great variety of species. I also studied the large selection of mosses which Harry Watson had written about in his booklet. We had diverse selection of students with four from Northern Ireland, one from Isle of Mann and the rest from all over Scotland. We had one very interesting series of lectures by one Professor Crystal from Oxford University. Quite unique and hilarious!
I must tell about memorable incident in my stay there. Alec McLaren appeared one day with an enormous cross cut saw at least 9 feet long and selected four of us to saw the butt off a giant redwood which had blown down the night previously. Well, it took the four of us six hours to do the job and I must say we were quite tired afterwards. We sawed away with two of us on each handle but it was sore on our biceps so we took off our leather trouser belts and sawed away with two on each end of the belts! No kidding!
I have no hesitation in saying that I enjoyed enormously my stay of two years at the School and was sad to leave in August 1951 to be transferred to Kirroughtree Forest in South Scotland Conservancy. Here I lived in digs along with George Goodlet and Andrew Liddell who was an ex student from Glentress School. I think I forgot to mention that when I was at Benmore, I was sent to the School in Thetford Forest for the three month transfer course. Very boring, too flat and all Scots pine even though it was my favourite tree. Kirroughtree was a good forest to work in as there was a wide diversity of plantation ages and there was a large nursery. I worked there for eleven years and all the time I was employed on the hill, planting millions of trees in an annual programme of 250 -500 acres. It was mainly Sitka spruce and Lodgepole pine mixture country with some areas of larch. Most of it was high elevation land and indeed I ploughed a small area of suitable soil in a very sheltered situation at 1600 feet above see level. I got a partially disabled chap to plant it with mountain pine. He is now 78 and I am 85 and neither of us have been back to see the result – I imaging deer will have won the day! I had one very pleasant job at Kirroughtree, planting a ‘Forest Garden’ which consisted of about 30 – 40 species including some hardwoods which turned out quite well although there were a few failures.
In 1962 I got myself married and was transferred to Mabie Forest in South Scotland and was given the job of starting the planting of part of the Lochar Moss. It was a raised bog with a peat depth of about thirty feet and was consequently a formidable task. We started ploughing in the summer of 1962 with a Fordson County tractor with wide extended tracks and a first year’s planting target of 250 acres which we managed to plough. But then, surprise - surprise, 1962 - 63 winter was a really hard one and in the Dumfries area there was no snow but a continual frost day and night from 26 December 1962 until 8th March 1963. The ploughing had turned out enormous furrows which were frozen to the core and we had to wait an extra five weeks after the last frost before we could work a planting spade in them. We didn’t start planting until middle of April 1963. At that time the Conservator South was a Mr J A B MacDonald who I believe was a research buff and who devised an unusual planting regime for the Lochar Moss. The peat was probably of a poor kind with low nutritional value and his planting scheme detailed that every second furrow was pure Contorta pine and the other furrow with a mixture of 3 Contorta pine, 3 Japanese larch, 3 Contorta pine, 3 Sika spruce, 3 Contorta pine, 3 Western hemlock, 3 Contorta pine, 3 Noble fir, 3 Contorta pine, 3 Scots pine, 3 Contorta pine and so on. As you can understand this slowed planting down considerably and resulted in a plantation of almost pure Contorta pine. We fertilised the first year by hand but afterwards until I left Mabie in 1969 we fertilised by air and I must say the trees were beginning to grow well. I continued to plough and plant Lochar Moss until 1969 when I was promoted to Head Forester and then sent to the only place I did not want to go to – Glentrool Forest!
I was at Glentrool for about 3 years when the Commission announced a redundancy scheme to my great surprise. I was not too happy with the way things were going and with the probable decline in the staffing and poorer prospects for promotion I decided to apply for redundancy in 1972. Glentrool was a Mecca for tourists then and I decided I was young enough to start again and took on a shop in Newton Stewart. Looking back at the planting that I managed and organised from 1952 to 1969 I estimate that my squads planted 12 million trees!"
Don Wood
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