Wood We….

Here in the Steadings, the afternoon was devoted to wood.
First of all, Graham and John (the Steadings’ two “muscles”) chopped a pile of logs into fuel, which Carol, Brian, me & Pauline, plus Graham’s sister Fran and her two boys, generally ran around shifting the wood, piling it into barrows and getting it to everyone’s wood stores.
We get our wood free, from the landlord’s woodlands; we don’t get to chop any trees down, but we can go in and take any fallen trunks, or spare wood that has already been logged. Last month, his spruce wood across the road was logged. First the harvesting machinery went in – huge grabs on caterpiller tracks that stripped each trunk of branches, sawed it off at the top and the base then stacked it onto a loader; the loader took the trunks down the hillside to a stacking area, where 15-foot high piles of trunks accumulated. Once that was done, wagon after wagon arrived and hauled off the wood.
The land will be replanted, mostly with native hardwoods; that will start next autumn. Before then, the land will be cleared of the piles of debris – branches, stumps, small trunks that litter the place. But, before that happens we have the freedom to go in and take any wood that’s left.
So Carol, John and myself went up there to have a recce. There were huge amounts of good wood left just lying around, everywhere we looked. Enough to keep our fires going for a year, at least. But, getting it out will be a problem – Graham is the youngest of us, and the only one who is completely fit; the rest of us have various combinations of arthritis, back problems, heart problems and chronic illnesses. There is no way a car or van can get up there, so everything will have to be handballed through the debris of ruts, stumps and branches and down the rocky hillside. Getting any useful amount of wood out will take us weeks, perhaps months.
But, maybe not. We all have teenage/young adult children/nephews/nieces – and they all have friends. What if we offered them a free holiday in the same week sometime during the spring, perhaps in the college break? A clutch of healthy youngsters, competing with each other to carry the heaviest logs and show off their muscles, would soon see all that wonderful wood brought down and into the log-store. Yes, a cunning plan indeed…