Winter Battles at Wandlebury after the storm

Winter battles against the pressure to reopen Wandlebury after the storm and with the fallen and damaged trees that needed felling.

A Drott Skiod Shovel

Coronavirus readings: Extract from Chapter 8 of podcasts from Bill Clark's 'Route and Branch'. Listen to full podcast here: https://archive.org/download/winter-battles/Ch8d-Winter-battles.mp3

The autumn and winter tree felling was much more traumatising than the storm; at least that was over in an hour or so, and it wasn’t I making the choices. To make matters worse, the timber merchant’s excellent contractor sent in January, was on another job, and they sent a great bear of a man, who swung his huge chain saw around like a scimitar, and drove his Drott Skid Shovel about with no care of his surroundings whatever.

His two labourers cutting and piling the cordwood, and burning up the trash, were bullied unmercifully – both of them injured themselves! Anyone else involved received his ire too; every day we shouted and swore at one another, as I fought to keep him from damaging other trees and the Ancient Monument. Things got a little better after his machine broke down and I fixed it for him; but he was a man who would always blunder through life, and to hell with whoever got in his way.

We started in the quarter mile avenue towards the Roman Road. Although some of these trees had survived the drought, my scheme was to ‘clear fell’, to enable complete replanting – scheduled for the spring. I was standing with the feller discussing which direction to fell the third tree, when one of his two men cutting the branches off the previous tree, shouted ‘Bats! Bats!’ and started to dance about.

I rushed over, but he had already stamped on one, luckily the other had crawled back into the hollow branch. The big strong man was shaking, and almost in tears! He wailed, ‘It was terrible – terrible. I cut through that branch, and out of the end jumped that great bat, and clung to my coat; uuurh, uuurh.’ I thrust my arm up the branch and pulled out the other Noctule. With the men now sharing a comforting flask of tea, I took the opportunity to give a lecture on bats, and the great trouble I was having with their conservation. At least from then on, I was always called when they found a hole in a branch or trunk – often before felling took place.