Woodland managers English Woodlands Forestry and harvesting contractors Powell Forestry invited Forestry Journal to Seaford College in West Sussex, where a complex operation of clearfelling and restoration is underway.
SEAFORD College is a private independent school committed to environmental stewardship, winning the ‘Independent School of the Year Green Award for Environmental Achievement’ in 2022 (for planting of a Jubilee garden).
Winners of the prestigious RFS ‘Best of the Best’ Silviculture award (SE) in 2022, English Woodlands Forestry (EWF) has managed the college’s 64-hectare woodland resource since 2016.
Depending on which way you look, these woods owned by Seaford College run either east to west, or west to east, along the north side of a steep chalk downland slope within the South Downs National Park.
Within Seaford College’s 2016 woodland management plan, EWF proposed a plantation on ancient woodland site (PAWS) restoration, clearing the only monoculture – five ha of densely stocked unthinned P1970s western red cedar (WRC) – within the area (according to searches made by an independent landscape architect) and restocking with more ‘site-suitable’ species.
Aside from site considerations, on paper these works should have gone smoothly and for the most part they did. When unforeseen circumstances arose, EWF and harvesting contractors (EWF’s sister company) Powell Forestry had to find a way to resolve them satisfactorily for all the parties involved. On a day luckily without rain or high winds, FJ visited the site to learn the story so far.
THE VISIT
EWF director Laura Henderson stands beside a pile of WRC cut into 2.5-metre bars and stacked at the edge of the loading bay created by Powell Forestry.
The loading bay is tucked against a forest edge of mixed conifers. The tall stems of Sitka spruce, WRC and yew shelter Seaford College’s forest school and provide a screen intended to mask most of what appears to be a steep bare slope from the south-facing windows of Lavington Park residences at the far end of the field.
Joined by Powell Forestry’s MD Neil Powell and harvesting manager Elliot Gooch, we walk through the forest edge to a bridle path running along the bottom of the bare hillside.
When viewed from below, the hillside appears vertiginous, its angle estimated to be 32 degrees, and divided in two. The lower 75 per cent is covered in mulched woody chunks, wire mesh tubes, weedy greenery and bare ‘totems’ left for raptors. Too steep for machinery access, the top 30 metres is covered in a brash mat of stumps and coarse branches.
Laura suggests walking to the top. The invitation is politely evaded until the group clarifies that we would ascend via the bridle path, which bounds the site. Walking clockwise, the path follows a relatively gentle incline up through mixed woods of dense drawn-up WRC and beech (left), along a brow backdropped with mixed broadleaf, descending via mixed woodland of beech and ash (right).
“It is worth it for the view,” says Laura.
PAWS RESTORATION PLANNING
Operational planning split the clearance into two phases. Works Phase 1: Part 1 was scheduled for 2020; Works Phase 1: Part 2 for 2021. During Phase 1, site factors to take into account while clearing “five ha of overstood WRC with little biodiversity value,” as
Laura puts it, included the steepness of the incline, working within school grounds and timeframes, within a national park and around a power line (western edge), and environmental considerations: ADB-infected ash (west); the possibility of Ips typographus invading ride-side spruce (east); the risk of windblow on any remaining trees.
WORK PHASE 1: PART 1 – ALL GOES ACCORDING TO PLAN
Works Phase 1: Part 1 began in June 2020 on the first day of the school holidays. With the firm bridle path offering machinery access around the site, the only infrastructure needed below the WRC plantation was a track dug by Powell Forestry to link the loading bay to the bridle path.
Heading east between greening bridle path edges, a track mulched smooth leads up to a concrete hut (school’s clay pigeon shoot) on the edge of a flat clearing. Above it, the scarp’s crest is a backbone of vertical root plates. Storm Eunice flattened this compartment in February 2022.
Into mixed woodland, the path turns right and up behind the hut and clearing. Downslope plantings of P1970s WRC are mixed with ash, which has colonised the gaps and wet gullies where cedar won’t grow. The planting density gives an impression of the stocking levels across the neighbouring cleared five ha, although “the fell site was even more densely stocked”.
The power line that bisects this wood disappears at the bottom of the incline. Neil explains: “Between 2020 and 2021, the school had the line submerged where it ran across the playing fields, leaving it to pop back out again in the woodlands. We can’t work within a tree’s distance of the line and requested a week’s shutdown, temporarily stopping the feed to the residential development and the school, who still have activities during the summer.
“Residents and the school wanted to know who would pay for it. We couldn’t. A temporary generator costs £5–6,000 per week depending on how many houses feed in, far outweighing any timber income.”
Further up on the path’s upper slope, wild box grows amongst older mixed broadleaf woods. On the downslope opposite, a dry water gully cleared of foliage and widened during unplanned operations (Works Phase 1: Part 3) provides a safe platform from which to peer through the bowels of the steep woodland below. Laura highlights: “You can see how difficult it would have been to thin and how easy for wind to blow this over.”
Nearing the path’s brow, we reach the first of a series of access scrapes, level surfaces dug by an eight-tonne Doosan excavator kept on standby by Powell Forestry for infrastructure works, on which machinery either hauling or processing trees cleared from these upper slopes can safely operate.
Neil says: “The clearfell wasn’t tricky, but it is the steepest slope we have worked.
Knowing what the harvester, an eight-wheeled Komatsu 931 (borrowed from Komatsu while Powell’s was repaired) could achieve, we worked with the slope, going up and down (so that machinery did not tip over), to where it was cost-effective and commercially viable.”
In areas too steep for the harvester, Powell had “hand-fellers manually felling down to where the harvester could grab a tree, or they took down a cable from the remote-operated 10-tonne winch (secured to a Valtra forestry tractor) dug in at the top, felled the tree, secured the cable around the stem and hauled it back up.”
Elliot adds: “The harvester was up here on the access scrapes for speed, cutting trees to the right lengths before the Komatsu 840TX forwarder came round collect them.”
Throughout the works, Powell Forestry used a WhatsApp group to advise the school (and EWF managers) of what was happening and – with timber movements restricted to the middle of the day – when the timber wagons were coming in. “If there was a summer school tournament, we had to work around that,” says Neil.
A second scrape has been repurposed as a viewing platform. They were right: it is worth the climb. The view looks down across 150 metres of harvested hillside, brashed or mulched, over the forest edge, over the school buildings and private residences accessed by (private road) ‘The Drive’ sweeping through the 400-acre Lavington Park (Heritage England Grade II: Park and Garden), out across the valley to end at the Surrey Hills.
Variegated clouds rolling from the west provide a filter that shades or highlights details in this recently revealed landscape: shaded stud paddocks, hedgerows, spreading woodlands, sunlight illuminating a field whose crops are covered in white plastic sheeting and reflect like water, a near-distance parkland cedar and a gnarly old parkland oak.
WORKS PHASE 1: PART 2 – UNFORSEEN ISSUES AND SOLUTIONS
Harvesting, Works Phase 1: Part 2, took place in June 2021. Perhaps already disturbed by works to bury the power lines and their associated costs, Lavington Park residents complained to the college about the ‘big scar’, “as some people refer to the immediate impact of these works,” says Laura, who joined EWF around this time. “The proximity of the site feels to them like an extension to their gardens.”
The college asked EWF to engage with the residents. “In face-to-face meetings, some people were pretty dissenting. They hadn’t been prepared for the visual impacts. They didn’t understand the project’s scale or the need for rapidity,” the second phase needing completion before college-organised repair works to ‘The Drive’ in August, “and that there was no benefit to splitting work up into smaller chunks (due to the economics and ecological responses).”
In July 2021, EWF instructed independent consultant landscape architect Roger Worthington to check the visual impacts of harvesting and restocking proposals. He produced a ‘Landscape Considerations for Discussion’ report, including visuals of works from selected viewpoints and the ‘greening’ of the ‘big scar’ (estimated in 2024).
“Roger looked at the site’s history and agreed with restocking proposals. He advised working with the topography: exploiting biological and biodiversity connectivity opportunities, leaving gullies as open space to encourage flora and the insect life they support, joining up with the college’s lowland meadow restoration.” He also suggested leaving the field edge of mixed conifer, including spruce. “During our stakeholder engagement, we asked residents if we could remove them then (2021) or wait. Almost unanimously, they preferred to wait and have a bit of a screen.”
The bridle path begins its descent. At the request of riders, Powell built up the downslope bank, providing a barrier to stop horses being spooked by the bare drop.
In September, in an addendum to the ‘Landscape Considerations for Discussion’ report, photographs show the hillside screened by a conifer edge, with broadleaves retained for connectivity maintaining the flow of the tree line above what was once a wet, mossy gully supporting encroaching ash, now very much mulched and dry.
Ground preparation, mulching the lower slope of the five-ha site, took two weeks.
Beneath ‘totems’ “likely to suffer windblow, but it is worth a try,” says Laura, planting measures (stakes) run vertically up the slope at uniform two-metre spacing.
“It took two days for a team of six planters (from company Tomorrow’s Forests, which employs several Canadians accustomed to steep planting sites) going up and down the slope to plant 8,000 trees, cell-grown and bare rootstock (stock sourced mainly from Cheviot Trees), the top 30 metres as an approximation planted directly into the brash mat.”
Responsible for managing the restocking, Laura has welcomed all the advice offered.
“Sussex Wildlife Trust advised on species choice to help favour a rare moth found locally. The SDNP also came out to site to advise.” The tree species chosen include some beech for historical reference, more hornbeam for climate change, rowan, yew and field maple.
100 disease-resistant elms (Lutice and Ademuz) are retrospectively protected from deer browsing by wire tubes, making them easy to see. Smaller whips have been covered in Trico, a sheep-fat-based product repellant in both taste and smell to roe and fallow deer.
Trico is being trialled in order to reduce the visual impact and costs of fencing or tubing the trees.
“The SDNP, keen to see the WRC removed from a PAWS site, have been supportive throughout. They sourced and funded the supply of the elms for planting and the shrub species (dogwood, Guelder rose, wayfaring tree, juniper, hawthorn). They also supported two applications of Trico (product and labour) through their ‘Sites for Nature’ funding.”
Additional support for the trees came from the RFS’s ‘Trainhugger’ grant scheme.
WORKS PHASE 1: PART 3 – AN ADDITIONAL OPERATION
In August 2022, an unforeseen Works Phase 1: Part 3 saw Powell Forestry clearing an additional 500 tonnes of timber windblown by Storm Eunice across the eastern slope.
The team finished by levelling the ground and creating an access track up to the clay pigeon shoot hut, making the site safer and the hut easier to access.
Working on steep ground firmed by hot weather did make site conditions easier.
However, on the hottest day of the year (recorded here at 32C), the forwarder’s engine insulation caught fire. “Working at that angle, the engine’s insulation must have fallen forward onto the exhaust,” explains Elliot.
Neil adds: “Luckily, we had enough fire extinguishers on site to put it out.”
WORKS PHASE 2
The bridle path leads to a strip of beech and ash woodland growing across the valley bottom to the west. Scrawny bare ash crowns and stems hung up from rotten, blown-out bases belong to some of those trees marked for clearfell in 2021. Clearfell proposals were amended to thinning out stems then most affected by ADB.
“Removing all the ash at the same time as the WRC would have been too much for the site ecology and landscape impact,” says Laura.
This summer, Powell will thin out the rest of the ash. As a preventative measure against Ips typographus, it will remove any spruce growing alongside the lower bridle path and thin any remaining WRC that needs it.
In terms of any establishment and maintenance the original five-ha site requires, Laura has yet to decide whether the ground flora competing with the young plantings needs maintenance spraying or brush cutting.
She is interested to see how the new trees respond to being planted in the brash and the success of using Trico on broadleaf. “We planted at 1,600 stems per hectare with a view that we could sustain some losses. If we do a beat up (replacing losses), we might have to consider additional protection (biodegradable). However, any tubes on a hillside like this it would have a large landscape impact and we prefer not to use any plastic.”
LEARNING
Almost a year since Works Phase 1: Parts 1 and 2 finished, Seaford College is reportedly happy and the long-term landscape impact will be positive.
Of the five-ha clearance, Neil says: “The budget worked, coming out more or less as we predicted: 2,500 tonnes of timber went for cladding, and a small amount for fencing, some as far away as South Wales.” He is investigating Swedish methods for working on steep ground and considering investment in a winch for harvesters.
READ MORE: Forestry workers on the ground need fair pay to match efforts
For EWF, early community engagement is essential. Laura says: “We can advise the client, but it is down to them to instruct us. Employing an independent professional showed commitment beyond works being solely a commercial enterprise. When people questioned our decision-making, it helped massively.”
She acknowledges the dramatic landscape change and why some residents may not want to engage with it, even as the trees establish and the slope greens. “This is a north-facing slope in its third year and already greening up. As foresters, we see this as a positive change – a rebirth, not a ‘scar’.
“When asked what trees they might want us to consider when replanting, a resident suggested holm oak. It’s a non-native, not easy to establish and not site-suitable. For those reasons we vetoed it, but we had a dialogue and heard the sorts of things that people want. As foresters, taking people on a journey is part of our responsibility, and one that I quite enjoy. We all should do more of it.”
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here