October 9th – Up on Cannock Chase, I noted that tree felling had been underway at Berry Hill, leaving the landscape more open and naked than I’d ever seen it here.

People who know the Chase appreciate that like farmland, this is a factory floor, and that the wood grown here is commercially valuable and the reason the forest exists. So the felling doesn’t concern me.

The cut trunks in neat stacks were fascinating and smelled beautiful, and counting the rings, I was surprised to note some of these trees were over fifty years old.

All part of the cycle of a commercial forest.