How can we respond to anti-forestry social media warriors?

I was born in Scarborough, in St Mary’s maternity hospital in the winter of 1960.

St Mary’s was a mental hospital by the end of the decade and I was known as the one that had been born in the sanatorium by my elder siblings. Scarborough is of course known as the Yorkshire Riviera, although growing up, my peer group associated it more with its two most famous products, dog crap and ice cream, although in recent years it has also become famous for its traffic lights; the story being that it has one set for every resident, and driving in from the York side you can almost believe it.

Just at the beginning of my career as a local motorcycling lout, I spent a couple of happy years at the Technical College learning my trade as a fabrication engineer. One of the perks of being at the East Coast College, as it’s now called, was bunking off to the woods 10 minutes up the road, where many a fun afternoon could be had with the girls from the office and business department. Little did I know those Borough Council-owned woodlands would provide a memorable couple of summers almost 40 years later.

It was Steve Dresser, the much-missed but never forgotten timber buyer, who reintroduced me to Raincliffe Woods back in 2015. I had been into the woods on a few occasions over the preceding years as there had been a sawmill located there and I occasionally sold sawlogs to the proprietor. The Raincliffe mill had been built by the Borough Council to produce sawn timber for its own use. Much of the woodland was larch, which was preferred for fencing, so the woodland would be self-sustaining (at least that was the plan). The sawmill was regularly burgled and so, with the times a-changing, it was mothballed, then leased out to local hopefuls who thought there might be money to be made from sawing timber. There wasn’t, not there at least. It was common to find the mill doors wide open in the mornings, with anything easily removed having been spirited away in the night.

Situated to the north-west of Scarborough, Raincliffe Woods is an area of mixed woodland once managed for the commercial production of timber, now in the hands of a not-for-profit community interest group. (Image: FJ)

Another issue was that there had been no such thing as articulated timber lorries when the mill had been built. When we started cutting timber in the woods all those years later, the bend at the top of the hill needed a wide sweep putting in to allow loaded lorries to make the turn. This was fine going downhill, but coming up the hill loaded was a different story, so round timber deliveries all had to be done with rigid lorries, which were becoming scarce even back then. The last two people who rented the sawmill site suffered lots of burglaries and vandalism and eventually it burned to the ground. The lack of access was partially to blame as when the fire brigade eventually got through the locked barrier they couldn’t get around that sharp bend with a full tender of water. By the time they did get to the blazing building, there was little they could do. The council’s problem was finally solved by bulldozing the wreckage and turning the site into what was to become our stacking area.

So it was with all this knowledge swilling around in my memory that Steve laid out his plans for harvesting the 700 tonnes of larch thinning he’d bought from the community enterprise group.

The council had decided to hand the woodland back to the local people. To some it was viewed as an opportunity, to others it was a cynical attempt to offload a looming problem that was likely to be difficult and expensive to administer.

I went with Steve to have a look around the sites and there was some nice timber. The larch was well grown, the access reasonable and the ground dry. It certainly looked like a nice little job, but I could see from the many well-trodden footpaths that the woods were heavily used.

“What about the locals?” I asked.

“Oh, they’re very much on side. The view is that the council has neglected the woods for years and now the community has a chance to make them into a really great resource for the people of the town.”

I felt a peculiar sensation in my stomach. “When you say community, who do you mean?”

“There’s an elected board of local people, guided by the Woodland Trust.”

“Elected by whom?”

“I don’t know, but it’s all been done following due process.”

Whatever that means, I remember thinking. “It’s all harmony and light, then? There’s no opposition to the work going ahead?”

“Well, there was this one woman who had a lot to say. I talked to the board afterwards and they said she was a newly signed up member and they would talk her round. She’s a single dissenting voice. No-one listens to her.”

Oh really, I thought. I didn’t see any real problems, but I didn’t like the ‘no-one listens to her’ line, suggesting she’d been making trouble already. It was a four-week job, maybe five, and other than keeping off the designated footpath and not using any traction aids, the list of constraints wasn’t too bad. I’d instruct the lads to be polite to the dog walkers and answer questions if asked; we’d try and build a rapport with the locals and it would all go smoothly – and it did, until the harvester was unloaded off the lorry.

It was then the local lady who’d voiced her opposition took photographs of said machine and used them in her campaign to get the work stopped. She started that very afternoon, creating a Facebook page and website with a picture of the ‘huge machine’ plundering her woodland.

I was oblivious to all this, being 60 miles away finishing off the clear fell we had been doing. In fact no one knew what was going on until that evening, when the harvester operator’s wife handed him her phone.

“Isn’t this the same sort of machine you drive ?” she asked.

“It isn’t just the same. It’s the actual one!”

He sent me a message and within minutes we were aware we’d become famous as the pillaging lumberjacks destroying the woods. My phone didn’t stop for a week as the new Facebook page the saviour of the woods had created went from strength to strength.

Looking back all these years later, I can say I bear the lady no ill will. I regularly communicate with her and, although she caused me a horrendous amount of trouble in those early days, it wasn’t something entirely new and I did eventually come to admire her tenacity. She hadn’t a clue about forestry, but she took a principled stand and she couldn’t (and still can’t) be swayed. In fact, lately I’ve come to agree with much of what she was complaining about. She might have known little about forestry, but she did know about human nature and the failings of people when they’re given a little bit of power.

Despite all the trouble we had – the verbal abuse, posters, notes pinned to trees and newspaper articles – we never suffered any vandalism and no-one touched any of the equipment we were forced to leave on site.

It was about a week before the forwarder arrived when the poster campaign got into full swing. We had lots of the basic ‘look what they’re destroying now’ type posters, which were mainly aimed at the enterprise group. There were a few pointing out the mess the felling was making, which were pretty unimaginative, but there were some which had me laughing out loud.

There were occasional areas where the enterprise group’s woodland consultant would mark trees with a stripe of paint and the Facebook page carried a picture of the condemned trees all branded for the slaughter. That wasn’t particularly funny, but someone came up with the bright idea of altering the marks to make them look like frowning faces. The ranks of  miserable-looking trees looked funny if slightly disturbing as each one was embraced by the 625 Viking and turned into chipwood. It didn’t end there though, because I became adept at stacking the pieces of timber with the frowns uppermost in the stack. Walkers must have been bemused to see all the miserable faces in the wood piles.

One morning I was walking along one of the footpaths in the wood when I saw a piece of laminated A4 paper pinned to a fallen pine tree. This particular tree had succumbed to honey fungus a couple of years before, with the characteristic butt end that is the result of all the roots simply rotting away until the tree falls over. I pulled the paper off and read through it with growing amusement. It was a diatribe about how we were useless foresters doing it all wrong, but mainly it was pointing out we’d felled that particular tree and left it in an unsafe condition blocking the footpath. ‘We walk this path every weekend’, it concluded. 

I took the paper home, scanned it and added a note of my own. I wrote: ‘No one felled this tree. It died through years of neglect and it wasn’t on the footpath. Given the quality of the insulting literature we typically find, this is a very poor effort. I feel you are letting the side down, so go away and do some research or leave the hate campaign to those who put the effort in to enable them to deliver a quality product.’

The job muddled along that first year until an incident on the last day, the very last part-load of timber on the forwarder to be precise. The final run the harvester had done had left me with a bit of a conundrum. Halfway down the rack was a tree leaning out so far I couldn’t get past it without rubbing it with the pins. I had a saw and felling bar in the cab, but I didn’t want to fell it. I decided to pick up a few grabs of brash and build the ground up near the tree so the forwarder’s pins would be pitched away. I backed up toward the footpath and grabbed all the brash I could reach, but just as I was about to pull forward a mountain bike flew through the air and bounced along the track.

Accompanying the bike was a rather well-fed chap in more lycra than any man of his girth should wear outside the privacy of his own home, shouting and waving his arms, saying I had knocked him off his bike. I opened the cab door and stepped out onto a wheel so I could hear him better.

He said: “You f****ing f****ing b*****d f***ing…”  You get the idea. This went on for a long time and was accompanied by an admirable attempt at mimicking a toddler who’d had his sweets taken away. I gave him a stern look and got back into the cab, slamming the door behind me. There was a loud bang on the back window. I turned and saw he’d hurled a stone at the forwarder and now he was doing his little dance and swearing loudly again.

I must admit the red mist descended then and, snatching the felling lever up, I exited the cab shouting: “Right, that’s it! You’re getting it now!” I don’t often lose my cool, but it had been a trial working there and I’d reached the end of my rope.

He stood for a second in near disbelief. I could almost see him thinking, ‘This shouldn’t happen, they’re supposed to keep taking abuse without reacting.’ He grabbed his bike and, after a couple of failed attempts to mount it, he abandoned that plan and ran alongside it until he’d put a bit of distance between us. Then, when he saw I’d turned back, he started shouting abuse again. I stopped and turned, he shut up and ran a few more paces. I stopped, he started shouting. I eventually climbed back into the forwarder and, after placing the brash, I picked up the last few grabs of timber. As I looked back he was still waving his arms. Obviously exercise isn’t a sure-fire way to improve mental health.

I stacked the last few grabs I’d picked up and set off to the car parking area where we loaded and unloaded the machines. Within the hour I’d said goodbye to the most stressful job I’d done in years.

Well before the cycling toddler incident we’d turned up on site one morning to discover our friend with the flyers had paid us a visit. There were new laminated posters on all the access points and at various junctions on the footpaths.

One of the unfounded accusations in those early days was that someone was getting rich out of the job. I quite clearly stated on social media that when I’d been approached to do the job it had been done as an open-book exercise. I had put my rate in and with it I’d had to show insurance costs, wages, running costs, etc. I even had to submit the cost of hauling my machinery to the site, but I wasn’t to include the cost of taking it away as that was associated with the next job. As usual I had to provide all my insurance certificates, machine operators, chainsaw and first-aid certificates etc, and I was right on the cusp of being local. I wasn’t actually a Scarborough resident, but living 20 miles away, maybe just close enough. I did gain a little credence as I’d been born in the town, but that wasn’t good enough for some. I was called an outsider at more than one meeting.

So the story went that it was all about the money, which of course it was. I wanted my cut, the haulier wanted his cut, Steve wanted his cut and the enterprise group wanted theirs to fund projects to bring the woodland back into management. 

There were no secrets. The entire financial details were on the enterprise group’s website, available to the public for scrutiny, but still the idea persisted and, in one of the funniest turns of the entire saga, a local artist (who I knew, as I’d hung about with her back in my college days) drew a brilliant cartoon. I had it on my phone as a screensaver for a couple of years, as did Steve, but I lost it. After much begging and many promises she agreed to give me the original, but it never appeared and I guess there was a certain amount of pressure applied to stop her fraternising with the enemy.

Yes, we were blighted by the attention of a group of locals and they did make life difficult, but it never descended into anything I’d consider sinister. It was mainly local people who didn’t trust the intentions of those given charge of a much-used and valued local woodland, and I must say I think they were right to be concerned given what I’ve seen in the years since I worked there.

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Before I sign off though, I’d better describe that cartoon. It was three characters, beautifully drawn. I was a marionette, a Pinocchio-like boy with an axe, in the process of chopping a tree down. My strings were being pulled by a puppetmaster in a hi-viz jacket with the management company logo on it, who was working the strings with one hand while passing a bundle of cash to the third character, who resembled the Gruffalo. This overgrown troll-like figure had a Woodland Trust document grasped firmly in its free hand and it completed the trio of the most despised people in the woods for those few weeks in 2015.

I returned to do another thinning in Raincliffe in 2016, but the fact I had a connection with the town and the woods made me rethink the whole idea and whilst we again completed the work without too much trouble, the buyer who’d replaced Steve on his retirement agreed there were less difficult and more profitable jobs on the horizon. So, in 2017, someone else got to face the wrath of the ‘save the woods’ posse and boy, did he cause some trouble. But that’s a story for someone else to write.