Bridgewood Glade

The Glade is located at the centre of Bridgewood, halfway along the Middle Ride. I'm using it as the "base of operations" and will be the place I'll set up any temporary structures like marquees for events.

During my initial survey in February 2008, I made this 360° view of the Glade. You can see it was already quite open when I started working on it, with widely spaced "full-size" trees or "standards" and little undergrowth.

The first tree that I felled was near the centre of the Glade, and it's stump is now the nominal dead centre point of the wood. The stump reappears on several later photographs and is only about 8 inches in diameter. I did the felling by hand with a bowsaw, but most of the subsequent work was done with a chainsaw, including cutting the tree up into logs in the summer.

Armed with the chainsaw, I went round the perimeter in a widening spiral, felling the standards into the centre of the Glade so they didn't get tangled or hung-up in the trees still standing. You can see the centre of the Glade here, partially cleared in June.

I had to clear some thickets and small trees of hazel in the Glade and whilst widening the other tracks and rides, and this is the best firewood of the trees being felled this year. Firewood has to be left to dry for several months - ideally a year - and I stacked the larger logs under corrugated iron sheeting to keep the rain out and on some galvanised iron to keep them off the ground. Most of the smaller branches were dragged off into the undergrowth and allowed to rot down, as this provides an important habitat for invertebrates, which in turn feed the birds and small mammals. The wood stack continued to grow in size, and the second photograph also shows a prototype (BDSM) rickshaw I co-opted for moving some of the logs during the "pick up sticks" phase.

In the autumn I ended up with branches, logs and trunks lying and overlapping across the Glade. As well as these pictures, I also put a short video on YouTube showing the Glade and Middle Ride. I began by cutting up the branches, and dragging them to the sides of the Glade to form a perimeter. This got them out of the way, but should also protect the surrounding undergrowth and thickets from being trampled. To provide a sharp boundary, I then cut the trunks up into three foot sections and rolled them to the edge.

With this all done, by the end of the year I had an area of 1000 square metres cleared. I made another video for YouTube showing a 360° view from the centre of the Glade. By March, the ground started turning green again where it had been trampled during the felling and clearing.