Timber felling above the Struie public road at Ardross Forest – circa 1978
The photograph was taken by the late Finlay MacRae who was a District Officer in the Forestry Commission based in Dingwall at the time. The images are courtesy of his daughter Donna.
This is an interesting harvesting image which shows the transition in harvesting technique from felling tree, dragging to a processing site and manually cross cutting into logs as has happened in the front half of this image. On the steep hillside in the farther distance an organised or perhaps a bench felling process has been used where by the fellers felled their trees, followed this up by converting them into the required log products and stacked them ready for the forwarder. The forwarder would be able to run unimpeded on the resulting concentrated brash mat and thus reduce compaction and damage to the soil surface when extracting the logs.
See PDF link below for another view of this historic change in timber harvesting.
See comments below and names David MacDonald, David Mackay, Fraser Allison, Norman Page and Alistair Mackenzie
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Groups: Forestry Areas
The woodcutters involved was David MacDonald,David Mackay,Fraser Allison,Norman Page and Alistair Mackenzie.At that site we were cutting and stacking between 200 and 300 pieces a day. Comment left on 02 September 2024 at 16:15 by David MacDonald