Felling, extraction and forest haulage

We fell timber and get it out of the wood. That is the whole of the trade, and it is what we are registered for. Galloway is conifer country. Most of what we cut is Sitka.

The work in outline

A logging job is a sequence, and each part of it depends on the one before. The crop is looked at first: what is standing, what condition it is in, how the ground lies, and where a lorry can get to. Only then is a felling plan settled, because the route the timber will take out of the wood governs the order the trees come down in.

Felling itself is either motor-manual, with a chainsaw, or mechanised with a harvester where the ground and the crop allow it. The stems are then snedded, the branches taken off, and cross-cut to the lengths the buyer has specified. Sawlog, small roundwood and pulp are cut to different specifications, and cutting to the wrong one costs money that cannot be recovered.

Extraction moves the cut timber from the stump to a stacking point at the roadside, by forwarder or skidder depending on the terrain. From there it is uplifted by timber lorry. What is left behind, brash, tops and unusable material, is either chipped, laid into brash mats to protect the ground from the machines, or left in windrows.

Felling

Clear fell, thinning and windblow, cut to the buyer’s specification.

Extraction

Timber brought from the stump to a roadside stack a lorry can reach.

Chipping

Brash and small material reduced on site rather than carted away.

Where we work

The registered office is at Castle Douglas in Kirkcudbrightshire, in the Galloway forest country of south-west Scotland. That is conifer ground, sitka spruce above all, with Scots pine, larch and mixed broadleaf on the better and lower sites, and the work follows the crop.

Making an enquiry

If you have standing timber, a block due for thinning, windblow to clear, or trees that must come down for another reason, say where the wood is, roughly what is in it, and when the work is needed. Access matters as much as the trees do, so it helps to say what a lorry can reach. Enquiries are answered either way.

Contact us · More on the forestry work