Posted on by David Miller

Timbeeeeer

It was during the 1970s & 80s that all the top stars in sport had this mad idea to infest their money into coniferous forest & the U.K. , but mainly Scotland, started to be covered in these evergreen trees. They of course were so dense that no other vegetation survived under their canopy, not many birds lived in them, maybe Crossbills, Goshawks, that was about it. You would see the occasional Roe or Red Deer on the edges, but basically they were an environmental nightmare & I am not to sure that the likes of Steve Davies ever made a fortune out of them.

Move forward to the present day & those trees are now fully mature & are being felled & some areas are replacing them with native trees. What is worrying to me is that some estates are just leaving the ground full of roots & ruts where the felling vehicles have been working. Okay this wilderness encourages all the plants that have been dormant to sprout into the light they have missed for years & native trees will replace the conifers, but it really is more of a blot on the landscape than the conifers were.

All around the view from our house the felling has been going on , mostly using those magnificent machines that cut the tree down, strip the branches off & cut the trunk to the required length, all in a matter of three or four minutes. It is not until you hear & see the trees come down that you realise just how dense that wood was & just how much timber they get out of that collection. The machinery that cuts, collects the timber into a stack, plus those mad drivers that collect it & haul it off to the timber yards, seem to have been working for weeks (from very early morning on until after dark) again showing just how much there was.

Of course you hope that Atholl Estates will replenish the woods with native trees sometime in the future, but in the meantime it certainly has changed our view. Below I will illustrate this to you, I have searched high & low for before photos to add to this article, but as usual I know they are somewhere on my cloud but will not find them until this has been published.

The wood directly in front of our house, this was used to house the pheasants before release for the shooting. But as the estate does not do much bird shooting these days, I presume the timber was more valuable.

The timber from that wee wood collected up ready for delivery to the mill, this shows just how much wood there was within it.
This is further up the hill & to the right of our house, the green field in front of the cleared area is where our village Rainbow Trout water is. And above that 2/3rds up the photo you can see a dead white tree, that is where our Brown Trout Lochan is.
More of a closer look at the deep ruts over the land where the timber has been carried down the hillside for collection. The dead tree that I said about is more obvious in this shot, its a long steep walk up to the Lochan, but well worth it, for the views & the fishing.

A much larger plantation on the hillside to the left of our house, as you can see plenty more conifers to remove yet.
The devastation here is at The Falls of Bruar, though this has allowed more light into the pathway, it doesn’t look that good to visitors. My wife surveying the bareness.