Infrastructure;

And how it can come cripple your project.

A Story in Signs.

I've mentioned here in previous pieces on The Real Coed Y Brenin the critical change that occurred in the management of the plantation in the mid nineteen nineties. This was the result of a combination of factors which I'll mention again here, briefly.

above: the endgame for all plastic signs.

Firstly, a flood of timber onto the market coming from eastern European countries that had formally been part of the Soviet Union and were keen to generate capital, one way of which was to cash in their forests. This flood of timber meant it was cheaper for UK mills to buy material from the docks rather than from local forests.

Secondly, the drying up of traditional markets for UK forestry products, such as the need for millions of pit-props for the coal industry; these had gradually been replaced by hydraulic jacks and this was followed by the dismantling of more or less the entire industry by the Conservative Government under Margaret Thatcher.

above: a relatively early Forestry Commission sign; simple design and font and just two colours hence easy to maintain.

Having begun with a very open mind, trialling many different species, the Forestry Commission had narrowed its focus onto a very limited number of softwoods that grew quickly in the mild, wet climates of parts of the UK, notably Cymru. These fast growing species produced poor quality timber and were really only suitable for pulp for paper. However, as time went on, UK paper mills became liable to accept a certain amount of recycled paper each year, meaning their demand for pulp wood was greatly reduced.

Hence the Forestry Commission found itself in possession of large acreages of poor quality, softwood plantation, requiring regular management in terms of thinning, with very little value as product.

Faced with this dilemma, the decision was taken by Comisiwn Coedwigaeth, Cymru, that is, the Forestry Commission, Wales or FCW¹, to switch away from production to recreation, tourism and conservation. The principle reason for this was to open up the organisation to benefit from European funding, in particular the Access Grants and to a certain extent, the European Social Fund, Cymru being classed as a deprived country. Coed Y Brenin was in some ways the first plantation to implement this new direction at any scale.

above: introduce a computer controlled router and switch from production to people and you get access to European funding for your infrastructure. Very pretty but consider the need for regular repainting to keep it looking that way…

The radical nature of this change cannot be overemphasised. The plantation that had originally been seen as a factory where visitors were actively discouraged and footpaths were largely ignored with many completely overgrown, changed into one that actively welcomed visitors. Over the next decade a completely new network of mountain bike tracks (the first in the UK) were implemented rapidly, public footpaths were cleared, repaired and signposted as well as new paths, including access for wheelchair users being constructed. This culminated in new toilet blocks at various locations and a new visitor centre with extensive car parks in Coed Y Brenin.

In consequence, actual management of the plantation was largely forgotten and stands were just left to grow on, whatever their age or condition, giving rise in the future to a whole new set of challenges which I have written about in previous pieces. Over the next two decades, apart from very small areas of clear felling (to keep some expertise alive within the workforce) the only tree based operations were to simply cut through wind blown trees where they blocked roads, tracks, trails or footpaths, leaving the cut lengths to either side, as "habitat" (more accurately known as “fuel for forest fires”). Within a few years, the numbers and expertise of the work force had also switched from trees and forestry to path and trail creation and mountain bike rangers.

Here we get to the crux of this piece, namely, infrastructure, that is the paths, tracks and trails plus the fencing, signage and support structures such as toilets and car parks. A certain amount of infrastructure is necessary on any site, from an allotment garden², through to a farm scale system, for the simplest of reasons, such as easy access. However, too much infrastructure, which inevitably degrades, rots, breaks down, requires repair or replacement, can easily become an increasingly expensive and unsustainable burden.

above: now change the body managing the forests to NRW and you’ve got a good excuse to completely redesign and replace all the signage! Every one of the many hundreds of ladder boards like this one needed that fancy bottom board and colourful logo routing on it and painting….yawn. The above cost about £700 at the time.

During those heady days of European funding, as the money flooded in, the FCW was able to implement a truly massive growth of infrastructure over two decades and I was in an interesting place to notice this transformation. Apart from living in the forest, I also worked at the signs unit responsible for creating signage for all the FCW's districts and later for Natural Resources Wales (NRW), on three occasions.

During my first stint at the unit in the late 1980s, prior to the switch away from production, the brief for signs from the Forestry Commission (FC) was very simple and clear; all signs were to be of wood, produced from the plantations, namely Douglas fir boards and posts; the signs were engraved (routed) with a plain font (sans serif, that is, no pointy bits, something like Arial); lettering was to be white with the background and posts in a standard FC green. The signs were routed using a pantograph router, a lovely old machine which required a fair bit of skill to control³.

above: a pantograph router. A lovely machine to operate, once you got the hang of it!

The signs themselves consisted of a head board routed with a crown in the centre and Forestry Commission below⁴, then a lower board with the name of the forest district on it. That was basically it, although there might be a third board with a few symbols on it for parking or a footpath. The idea was to keep the work "In House", with the design and colours simple and easy to touch up; the signs would go out with small pots of paints, FC green and white for that purpose. The Forestry Commission had two sign units, the one I worked at, in Coed Y Brenin and a second unit in Scotland and between them they produced signs for the all the forest districts in the UK.

When I next did a stint at the signs unit in the early nineteen nineties, I was pretty gobsmacked to find the pantograph router had been replaced by a considerably larger computer controlled machine. This beast with a moving bed something like two metres by one metre, was steered by numerical code⁵, produced on a sophisticated Computer Aided Design (CAD) software, running on a, at the time, top of the range PC⁶. This set up cost well over £80,000 and at the level of production the unit ran at, only a big organisation like FC Cymru could possibly afford such an investment. Incidentally, the machine is still working today, nearly thirty years on, having undergone several upgrades to its memory and electronics.

above: once you’re past the NRW entrance boards, get your head round this lot! The Signs Workshop charges by the letter and symbol so add a good few more grand for this lot. We’re a long way from the simple, two colours of the ol’ Forestry Commission!

The workshop manager had no experience with computers and had received just enough training to produce simple signs and worked from a single page of handwritten instructions. I already had some experience of computers and quickly picked up on the instructions and he gratefully turned the machine over to me. So I sat happily by myself in a little control room, drawing out the signs on the CAD software, turning them into NC programmes and feeding then through to the Great Router. I could watch the monster's bed shunting back and forth through a window and keep half an eye on it in case anything went horribly wrong (it did, very occasionally)⁷.

This upgrade in machine almost coincided with the change from production to recreation, tourism and conservation. Pretty quickly the designers somewhere in FCW's HQ down in Cardiff began to realise the potential of this combination of CAD design and NC router and the signs became increasingly sophisticated and complicated, emblematic of the increasing infrastructure appearing in the forest.

Over the next decade, each and every forest entrance in the Coed Y Brenin Forest District entrance was given its own headboard sign with its own unique animal, plus additional boards those indicating footpaths, trails of various types, with symbols for difficulty. As visitor numbers increased, the remit for signs drifted further and further from its original, sustainable origin and new types of display boards appeared, laminated in plastic with far more detail than could be routed; these were mounted on wooden lecterns. Increasing use of plastic was also made for markers for the growing number and types of paths, trails, tracks etc.

above: plastic signs abound and are rarely, if ever, collected so you can usually find them discarded on the sides of your well publicised path.

On my third period of employment at the Signs Workshop, further changes had occurred. For one, the unit had been taken over by a local workers cooperative and freed of the Forestry Commission control, was a much more efficient and profitable place to work.

Secondly, as part of further devolution of powers from Westminster to Cardiff, Llywodraeth Cymru (the Welsh Government) had amalgamated the Countryside Council for Wales, the Environment Agency Wales and the Forestry Commission Wales into one behemoth of a body, known as Natural Resources Wales (NRW), with a truly massive remit, of which management of the existing plantations and their Forest Districts was only a small part.

Of course, this meant replacing all the FCW signage with new NRW signs, throughout Cymru... The Signs Workshop won the initial contract and over the next three years, well over a million pounds passed through the business. The designers in Cardiff had a field day, changing the shape of the headboards, the lettering, details, introducing a whole raft of new symbols and colours. The workshop tackled each forest entrance in turn and it wasn't unusual for costs to be well over £10,000 per entrance. And remember, this was just the signage; when you consider the costs of new visitor centres, toilets, car parks, fencing, board edging to grassed areas, steps on steeper routes, management and upkeep and given that the life of a painted wooden sign is only about ten years, at the most, it is easy to see how infrastructure maintenance and replacement costs can spiral out of control.

above: Coed Y Brenin visitor centre; pretty, impractical in terms of use of space and maintenance neither easy or cheap, if you can be bothered to do any; a million pound plus needed so far.

Which is exactly what has happened. Along with funding cuts as we continue the movement towards slow growth, stagnant or shrinking economies, NRW are now facing a fifteen million pound shortfall this year, expected to rise to seventeen million next year and are looking at shedding 265 jobs and closing their visitor centres as well as severely curtailing many of their actual operations.

Wooden signs require regular maintenance in order to last. They need a careful wash at least once a year and more often if the sign is close to a road, followed by touching up of any damaged paintwork before it gets worse. Yet it is this idea of regular maintenance that seems to have been completely neglected, not just in terms of signage and other infrastructure but in pretty much all aspects of the forest, from the periodic thinning of stands within the plantation to removal of fallen or hanging trees. Even the visitor centres seem to have suffered from this neglect; Coed Y Brenin's supposedly "flagship" building, an admittedly pretty timber design but far from practical, is reported to require over a million pounds of renovation work and its only twenty years old!

Where this will all end is up in the air at the moment. A local community group has gained funding for a feasibility study looking into taking over and running the visitor centre in Coed Y Brenin but working with NRW is not easy, to say the least. The different layers of management within NRW appear to be unable to communicate with one another so no one in the organisation really knows what is happening, resulting in different answers to the same question coming from different people. This problem of management within NRW is itself a major issue which I will address separately here on Substack as there are important lessons to be learned from it.

So for now, think very carefully about existing infrastructure on your projects; do you really need it? If so, have you allotted resources, particularly time and money, for regular maintenance? And consider equally carefully before you introduce any new infrastructure, lest it become such a burden in the future tha it breaks your system.

That's it for now. Many thanks for reading and a warm welcome to new subscribers. Comments always welcome. Take care and mind how you go on your hopefully well maintained path. hwyl! Chris.

1. For the purposes of this piece and to favour non-welsh subscribers, I'll use the initials FCW to refer to the organisation. Apologies to the Cymru Cymraeg.

2. Interestingly, recent research suggested that the main carbon cost of allotment gardening came from infrastructure, namely concrete slabs for paths and sheds for storage. The research neglected to mention that these are one-off investments and can also be second hand that are usually passed on with the allotment; nor did it cover other materials that can be used for paths, such as scavenged wood chip or stone collected from the garden itself.

3. To operate the pantograph router you sat on a high stool and guided a cutting head with one hand and a pointer running in a stencil with the other. The stencils might be letters or symbols. The arm movements were very like a T'ai Chi exercise- too much pressure and you would push the pointer out of the stencil, too little pressure and the cutting head could wander. If your attention wandered, anything could happen and usually did leading me to go the workshop manager, cap in hand, and ask for another piece of wood, please...

The machine was powered by a floor mounted electric motor, very quiet so no ear protection was needed. The power was run by leather pulleys to the cutter, rather like some of the old dentist drills, (you'll remember, with a shudder, if you're of a certain age!). The cutter produced small chips which tended to stay on the board so eye protection was not necessary. Back in the “smoke wherever you want” era, you could sit there totally concentrated on the work in hand, with a fag hanging on your lip....no longer advisable.

4. This was before the Forestry Commission was separated into the Forestry Commissions of Wales, Scotland and Ireland, hence the need for a crown as the plantations were deemed part of the Crown Estate. So I suppose that for a short period of time I was working for Her Majesty. To be honest, the stencil we followed for the crown had far more detail than the Douglas fir boards could take, so it ended up as more of a vague, white splodge.

5. Numerical Code or NC is basically a series of X and Y coordinates that describe the lines and curves necessary to draw shapes, letters numbers, symbols and the like. The addition of a Z coordinated allows the programming of depth to the cut.

6. An intel 486 DX32 with a heady 4Mb of RAM, to be precise. The router itself only had a measly 32Kb of RAM and so long programmes had to be drip fed from the computer, line by line. You could turn on the computer in the morning and have time to roll a fag while it booted up….no longer advisable.

7. Incidentally, isolated in my little booth, I soon became fluent with the CAD package and was able to programme enough signs to keep the machine running all day in the first hour or so of the morning. So apart from getting up and going through to put a new board on the machine or change cutters, I spent most of the rest of the day going through every menu item on the CAD package and when I'd exhausted that, delving into the inner workings of the 486 and Windows For Workgroups 3.11 and trying things out. This meant that from time to time my experiments would crash the whole system and then I'd have to reboot the thing (turn it off and on again...), fingers crossed that I hadn’t completely trashed the installation, before anyone happened by and noticed.