Woodlands.co.uk - Community use
BTCV – Conservation Volunteers
BTCV is a social enterprise group and charitable organisation that enables people to make a difference to their lives and to improve the places around them. They have the largest team of environmental volunteers in the country and have assisted at 50,000 sites across the UK. With 50 years worth of experience for engaging, reaching and inspiring volunteers and their communities, they are the confident pioneers of creating environmental capital. Read more…
Creating Woodland Glades
Gatwick Greenspace Partnership (part of the Sussex Wildlife Trust) took on the management of Lower Orlton’s Copse, near Rusper, in March of this year *. Since then we have, in consultation with the Forestry Commission, decided as part of the management, to extend a small number of glades to open up the high canopy and improve the amount of ground flora in these areas. Read more…
myForest: a service for woodland owners
In April this year, the Sylva Foundation launched a new web-based service; myForest. Interest and support for the service has been encouraging, with some 5300 hectares mapped by 200 woodland owners across Britain, in the first six months. Quite a large number of these are members of the Small Woodland Owner Group. Read more…
Working for biodiversity
Gatwick Greenspace Partnership, now part of the Sussex Wildlife Trust, has leased Lower Orlton’s Copse*, near Rusper, on an initial three year agreement with the aim of improving the biodiversity in the wood, through a process of selective thinning and pollarding, and using the site for our Forest Schools project. Read more…
Excluded from school, but not from woodlands!
Many teenagers do not get on with school. Some are even excluded for being disruptive or other behavioural reasons, but what can be done to help them? One project that is proving successful is the Telford Access to Nature Partnership, managed by Cadi Price, a officer for the Severn Gorge Countryside Trust based at Ironbridge in Shropshire. Read more…
Sled Dog Training
Sled Dog training in Warleigh Woods. We were invited by woodlands.co.uk to use Warleigh Woods as a training ground for our teams of Siberian Huskies. An opportunity quite rare to us, as we are normally faced with lots of red tape and battles with the Forestry Commission. Read more…
Coed Hiraeth Ecotherapy Centre
Anyone who owns a woodland knows what a powerful antidote to stress it can be, a bolthole to get away from it all and get your sense of proportion back. Frederick Luckman discusses his work with the Coed Hiraeth project and explains how woodland can be used for its therapeutic value in aiding recovery from depression and other disorders… Read more…
Off-Road Horse Riding Through Woodlands
If you have your own woodland you can use its tracks for riding a horse or pony, but most riders also want to go further afield. And, of course, most people don’t have their own wood. Riding on roads can be dangerous and is, anyway, less enjoyable than riding on car-free tracks, so there have been various schemes developed to enable more off-road riding. Read more…