Further to our previous article, a spell of dry weather allowed working horses to visit Jubilee Stone Wood for two days over Easter. Two magnificent French Percheron heavy horses, Marcel and Jurgen from Oakfield Farm near Wotton-under-Edge, made a great start in extracting felled ash trees, in partnership with Backwell Logs.
The Horsering meadow was used as their base and for stacking the logs. The horses and their drivers John and Ryan made repeated trips along the permissive path leading to the Warrener's Cottage and steadily reduced the jumble of felled timber on both sides.
It was wonderful to see how the horses negotiated all the scattered logs, fallen stones - and holly - with complete trust in their drivers. Once hitched to a massive log they used their immense power to get the log moving with no hesitation and then drag it along at a very fast walking pace. A relay working pattern evolved with Jurgen using his more explosive power to extricate big logs from the tangled piles and then Marcel using his steady power to haul them all the way to the meadow. Once there, Katie loaded the timber onto Backwell Logs' trailer for transporting to their farm for processing. We are very pleased that the logs are being collected, seasoned and sold by a local business.
BET members were able to meet the horses on the Saturday after they had finished work. You can see lots more photos of the horses in action in this album.
It is great to be able to use a very traditional approach to extracting timber from the site with its difficult terrain and narrow paths. After the visit by the horses, there was still a large amount of timber to haul out and in the following months our volunteers applied themselves energetically to the challenge, as can be seen in this video of horses and volunteers in action:
