'Who says the life of a wood processor is boring?': Our young forester on the firewood boom - Danny, Champion of the Woods (September 2022)

WHEN I look at my diary, this is probably the time of the year I enjoy the most. After two months of doing nothing other than shearing sheep, my brain’s gone woolly and I’m beginning to talk in bleats (they have a very limited vocabulary).

The clacking sound the shearing device issues as it disengages from the machine finally stops and a great sense of relief courses though my bedraggled body. However, the financial rewards are great and I look forward to a short period of rest and recovery.

For me that last clack is like a starting pistol as I forget everything sheep-related and perform a huge ‘ewe’ turn back to everything timber-related. I know a lot of my shearing colleagues take an extended break and travel off all over the place, but for me no such thing. I don’t know whether I have sawdust in my veins, some deep psychological problem or just a healthy work ethic but, for whatever reason, I know I have a mountain of timber waiting to be sorted. September, for me, is catch-up month.

As well as felling in the north of England, the majority of the work I now undertake is mobile firewood processing. This is not my own timber, but other people’s. It’s rarely clean processor-grade timber, but often arb waste, oversized logs, misshapen logs, maybe entire trees – basically anything that won’t go through today’s fancy ‘all bells and whistles’ firewood processors operated by a static individual with joysticks. More often than not, it’s a smaller-scale farmer or landowner who doesn’t have the required equipment to turn trees into firewood. Once again, the ‘business model’ (for want of a better phrase) is based on doing the work no-one else wants to do. Invariably this work involves physical labour and graft, but just like shearing the rewards can be great.

Up until this point in time I’d never really been into firewood. To the general observer it looks a little like an unskilled free-for-all based on who can chop the most and who can spend all night delivering. And then one has to deal with the public, facing such comments as “my logs aren’t loggy enough”, “my logs aren’t all the same size” and “can you bring me a replacement bag?”. 

I was rather pushed towards firewood processing shortly after the first COVID outbreak.

I was inundated by individuals (largely shearing colleagues) looking for work now that they couldn’t spend the winter shearing in New Zealand, and had found themselves stranded in Northumberland with nothing to do. Among this group were some excellent shearers, but any woodland experience or qualifications were non-existent. No PPE and no chainsaw tickets, but a great work ethic and well, who can’t operate a log splitter? I decided there and then to invest in a couple of mobile self-propelled log splitters. I’d do the felling and cutting and they could do the splitting and hopefully people might like to pay us for the service. Now, two years on, I have established a good client base and it’s become a regular part of my annual programme. I’ve invested in new machinery and have a sturdy business plan, and although the majority of work is in the north of England, we occasionally go on tour.

The first real tour was to Haltwhistle, apparently the centre of Great Britain (and I know there’ll be people saying that’s hardly a tour as it’s still in Northumberland, but to those who don’t know, Northumberland is a huge place). This was more than a day’s job and justified a night away. The margins were tight and the financial risks were great and a lot of timber had to be processed by the three of us to make the job pay. A simple breakdown or miscalculation of the quantity of timber would have plunged the venture into the red and I’d protected myself by accepting it was a learning curve and, if it didn’t work out, then I could treat it as a short holiday.

The job consisted of two separate locations along the same route. The first, a place I’d never heard of, was just outside Haltwhistle and I was sure the two locations would tie in well. It turned out the first job bore no relation to the postcode we’d been given and we had to be guided by phone at 6.30 am by a lady with a foreign accent which was almost impossible to understand. However, more by good luck than skilful navigation, we arrived at the site, which consisted of 3-metre spruce chip, 10 tonnes of which was to be turned into billets for a newly installed biomass boiler on the adjacent property. We set to with intent, determined to make up for lost time, when the most bizarre and distracting event occurred.

At 7 am, a number of young ladies in various stages of dishevelment began to stream from the house and into taxis – some bright and breezy, some tired, some very attractive. Have you tried keeping a young, all-male workforce on task while being subjected to a bevy of scantily clad beauties? One couldn’t have imagined a more bizarre scenario – a half-felled Sitka plantation, a pile of processed logs, midge-infested Swaledale sheep bleating in the background and a catwalk of young, nubile babes! Who says the life of a wood processor is boring?

After much bird watching and sightseeing, the pile of spruce quickly disappeared and we cleared up, ready to move on to the next job. I still have no idea what kind of business the lady was running and the mind boggles, plus she insisted on paying me in cash. What really struck me about the wad of notes was how each one looked to have come from a different source; some neatly folded, some slightly torn, and some still scrunched up as if they’d been stuffed down the back of a sofa. Maybe they had!

Still bewildered, amused and intrigued we headed off to the next job. This time there was no eye candy of the female kind, but one of the largest freshly cut beech trees I’d ever seen, which was eye candy to me. Before we got there I’d been concerned the tree might be a little small (judging by the photograph the farmer had sent), thereby making the job unprofitable – but I needn’t have worried. The grand tour was still on!

Once there, we cut and split until darkness, whereupon a good feed and an early night was the order of the day. However, things didn’t go exactly to plan as it turned out nowhere in Haltwhistle on a Tuesday evening serves food. The chippie was closed, there were no carry-outs and none of the pubs (and we tried them all) offered meals. The problem was that on entering each pub we felt obliged to buy a pint. Unfortunately, by the time we reached the last pub, food was no longer on the agenda and we returned to our apartment at some ungodly hour, much the worse for wear.

The following morning came with the usual regret of a hangover. We probably awakened most of Haltwhistle attempting to make porridge from the breakfast bar provided and then set about the giant beech tree. The first few hours dragged past and little was said as we all battled with our own discomfort. Several hours in, the giant tree didn’t seem to have reduced in size and the only sound was the relentless crunch of the splitters and the pulling of the 90cc saw. However, some nine hours after we started, with hangovers finally beginning to clear, we had reduced the monster into 54 dumpy bags of fresh, wet, beech logs. We dragged ourselves into the pickup and headed back to the Coquet Valley to spend our winnings.

Much was learned from our Haltwhistle tour and, in hindsight, much fun was had and so a five-man tour of Lancashire is planned for next weekend. There’s a mountain of timber I pre-disked in the spring and I know they serve pie and chips in the pub on a Friday!