Woodland links

This year I made an offer and bought 19 acres of woodland.

In researching this whole subject over the preceding few months I collected quite a lot of relevant links, which I'm going to go through now for future reference and to give a broader picture of what's involved.

First of all, the Small Woods Association (based at the Greenwood Centre in Shropshire) and the Royal Forestry Society are membership organisations which can offer some advice to current and prospective woodland owners. The Small Woodlands Owners Group has also started recently and has an active web forum.

For buying forest land in the UK there are two main players: UPM TilHill and John Clegg & Co. Both of them deal in everything from large tracts of conifer forests down to modest woods of 10 to 20 acres in size. Sales are usually by an informal auction between interested parties, followed by the normal English conveyancing process, just like with houses (offer, searches, exchange of contracts, completion date.) There are also two "retail" vendors, Woodlands.co.uk and Woods4sale, who deal in much smaller plots of about 4 acres, for considerably higher prices per acre, and various schemes like Woods For All and Ancient Woodland where you're effectively buying shared access to woodland with other random people.

When buying, it's important to check and think about all the fine print, especially rights of access, any covenants restricting use of the land, and whether the sporting rights (ie the right to shoot animals) are included. This last point is important even if you never plan to shoot things: for people growing timber it's not unusual to buy a long leasehold on forestry land, but for someone else to own the sporting rights and therefore have a right of access - which could matter a lot if you want to do BDSM or just some quiet camping!

Next on to books. A Wood of Our Own by Julian Evans has inspired a lot of people to go out and buy woods, and gives a flavour of Evans' experiences since the 1980s. More practically Woodland Management by Christopher Starr and Caring for Small Woods by the late Ken Broad offer concrete advice about overall management of woods and trees, and in Broad's case the practicalities of planting. Even more detailed, the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers have a comprehensive set of handbooks, many of which are relevant to woodlands and all of which are online on their website. However, you should consider buying any that you use, both for convenience in the field and to support the work of the trust.

Last year (2007) saw a spate of newspaper and magazine articles about buying woodland:

Sanctuaries for sale, The Guardian, 4 Oct 2007
Owning a plot of forest isn't just for the wealthy, The Independent, 25 October 2007
If you go down to the Woods Today ... Easyjet inflight magazine, Nov 2007
Buying woodland to generate tax breaks, Country Life, 8 Nov 2007
Owning your own woodland, The Telegraph, 24 Nov 2007
Woodlands lure in new buyers, BBC News 24, 28 Dec 2007 (this is a link to a video stream.)
Buying your own wood, The Times, 12 Jul 2008

And there are a few blogs and personal websites of UK woodland owners: Tracy and Mike Pepler, Scrag Copse, Coed Tan-Y-Bryn, Ewar Woowar, Rawhaw Wood, Moss Wood, Wern Wood, Midsummer Wood, Lightwood, Lodgegate Wood. There are also some pagan woods: The Olgar Trust's Venus Wood; Morgan's Wood (and blog) is being developed as a place for workshops, retreats and ceremonies; and Ormswald has been owned by followers of Germanic heathenry since the 1980s.