The Real Coed Y Brenin

Latest News Hot from the Forest

I've been noticing various things going on in the forest and as they relate to pieces I have written about already, I felt an update would be useful. So here's some of the latest news from the forest and some other stuff which deserves a mention but is not of such significance to merit its own piece.

Wetlands and peat bogs.

Following my recent piece on The Once Very Wetlands of Coed Y Brenin, where I suggested the old peat bogs might be restored by clearing the trees and scrub, blocking up the drainage ditches and employing fascine causeways to raise the water table- well whaddya know? On one of my recent wanders I noticed what had been a peat bog towards the top of our watershed had been marked off with orange tape. A few days later and all the regenerating trees and scrub had been cut and green tape used to mark something else, though I don't know what yet.

above: what was once a peat bog newly cleared of trees and scrub. What the green and whote tape is marking is currently a mystery. Not unusual for Coed Y Brenin.

All this is intriguing coming so soon after my Substack piece. Coincidence, synchronicity or is someone in Cyfoeth Naturiol Cymru (Natural Resources Wales or NRW) actually paying attention?

At the moment the area is looking like heathland with blobs of heather dotted over it. If they really intend to recreate wetland here, they'll have to read my piece again and block up the drainage ditch under the footpath, so the water can start to back up and raise the water table, slowly re-wetting the now dry peat and hopefully allowing sphagnum moss to flourish again. We shall see.

Bryn Merllyn Quarry.

On the other hand, my piece on NRW Aggregate Quarry versus Sacred Druid Pool has (sadly) had no effect whatsoever. On the contrary, a month or so ago, there was a sharp crack in the air and a low rumble through the ground as NRW blew up a bit more of Bryn Merllyn. I've been expecting a stone crusher to appear to grind up the rock into aggregate but as yet nothing else has happened.

above: quarry before and after with enlarement of blasted area showing shattering of rock.

Fortunately they are blasting downward rather than working back toward the merllyn, so there's still time for them to run out of money (blasting is very expensive) and the whole operation get shelved before they destroy the sacred site. And there's always the chance that the Druidic curse will get them in some novel way...

Larch and the Great Plague

Lack of progress at the quarry is probably because most of NRW's attention is still focused on felling all the larch in Cymru before it succumbs to the dread phytophthora ramorum, to which larch is particularly susceptible, with the risk of the disease spreading from the larch to other species. Large empty spaces are appearing in Coed Y Brenin where larch has already been clear-felled but much remains still to be done.

above: spaces appearing in Coed Y Brenin as blocks of larch are clearfelled.

Considerable stacks of felled larch are also growing in various places and despite regular sightings of well laden timber lorries going out, the stacks hardly seem to be shrinking. Some of this wood is pretty amazing, from a sawyers point of view. I was admiring a great pile of larch logs, roughly 40-50cms in diameter, 80 years old, the growth rings almost perfectly concentric indicating the trees have not grown under stress, 4.9 metres long, straight grained and almost completely know free- wow! This has got to be some of the best grown timber in the country, sadly never to be repeated.

above: 80 year old larch logs the likes of which we shall probably never see again.

I was guesstimating how many low impact homes we could build with this stuff and rather that counting individual dwellings, very quickly started to add stacks up into entire villages. Unfortunately its been sold to France, not that I have anything against France, just that Cymru has its own housing crisis and here's enough timber here to make hundreds of families happy!

More of the modern world appears on our doorstep.

I was aware when we first arrived here in 1986 that although the place was remarkably quiet and peaceful then, (five gates on the council road so no traffic, pre-mountain bike trails so no mountain bike hordes, footpaths overgrown so no walkers in the woods, pre-internet so no fungus forays or selfie hunters) it was only a matter of time. So it has proved to be.

Latest manifestation is a 40 metre (120 feet) tall Emergency Services Network mast that will also host an enhanced 4G mobile phone transmitter, all within 400 metres of our door. We were the only people to object to it, being the only people who will be affected by it...and the only people who will benefit from the enhanced 4G, as long as we keep our tin foil hats on, if the internet is to be believed (its not).

above: Moel Friog gains a new structure, visible from all the classic viewpoints, Precipice Walk, Moel Offrwm, Cader Idris…

That's not quite true as the emergency services, especially the Air Ambulance, can have a lot of trouble finding and contacting injured folk on the ground. My mate Dave had a nosy in one of their helicopters when it landed in his field and he said there were eight or nine mobile phones sitting between the pilots, each one with a different provider and they still couldn't get complete coverage.

So when the mast is finally commissioned, they'll be able to find that walker who has slipped and might have sprained their ankle and whisk them off to Bangor, just in case, for an ego-massage, I mean treatment, (in my day we just had to limp home).¹

Watching progress and the lack of it, on the mast has been interesting. A company called Heyrod has the main contract and then sub-contracts out different stages of the job. Each of the subcontractors in turn comes in and works flat out to do their bit (some have been working from 7am to 10pm every day; obviously paid a lump sum so the quicker they can do it the better). Then there's a long pause of days or weeks when nothing happens before the next sub-contractor comes in and rushes through their bit. All very odd really.

Currently the council road that passes our place is closed as a power cable is laid in a trench down the middle of the road, coming down from poles at the top of the hill. This has been made all the more interesting as the sub-contractor who dug the trench cut through all the culverts that directed water into the stream that runs parallel to the road. Now with nowhere to go, the rain water, which can be considerable, is finding all sorts of interesting new places to emerge.

Meanwhile, the mast is up and it is a novel new structure to have in the local environment, dwarfing the trees. The ravens took great offence when the construction work kicked off on their favoured hill and we hardly saw them for months and feared they'd moved for the first time in at least 35 years and probably longer. Now, thankfully, they are back and hopefully will get used to the monstrous metal tree, build nests on the thing or at least poo on the transmitters or something equally awkward.

A compound has been created on the large concrete slab around the mast base enclosed by a two metre high mesh fence topped with barbed wire. Various metal cabinets and a sort of shed have appeared along with signage issuing strict commands not to enter or climb up the mast, though no one thought to lock the compound gate...We’re wondering if the mast will have lights on it to warn off the following;

Low Flying Aircraft...

When students and visitors remark how quiet our place is I have to point out that this is not always the case and the forest is at times subject to considerable noise. We're aware that we live in a working (sort of...) forest and expect to have timber being felled by noisy machines on the other side of our fences or hedges every few years or so, the odd explosion at the quarry, stone crushing and the like- not a problem, its a working forest. However, One of the worst assaults of an aural nature and impossible to get used to are low flying aircraft.

above: not my picture I’m pleased to say. Weapon of mass destruction flying the Mach Loop in the Talyllyn Pass stage. A scary thought is that from here it might be possible to take one of these things down with a well timed and thrown brick….

There's an RAF air base up north on Ynys Môn (Anglesey) and an airport just over the hills at Llanbedr and with us being on route for the Machynlleth Loop², we're very well served by aircraft. Like flies, they tend to come out when the weather is fine and if its been a wet, overcast month then the end of the month can get very busy as pilots try to get their hours in, (as I write, the roar of jet engines comes and goes..).

We get buzzy, very low flying, propeller trainers, usually in pairs, though sometimes one of the pair is a drone. These can buzz about pretty much all day, sometimes out of sight and presumably performing some form of repetitive, aerial manoeuvring, sometimes swooping past then circling to have another go. Then there's a range of the RAF's hugely expensive war machines including the £92 million F35 Lightning. The fighters are impossible to get used to as you don't hear them coming, just the appalling thunder as they roar overhead and you're looking up at the rivets on the fuselage.

Complaining doesn't help either. Our old friend Steve painted “Piss Off Biggles” on his shed roof in large white letters and ended up attracting whole squadrons of British and European aircraft, including on one memorable morning four Apache attack helicopters, all keen to see the infamous roof. The roof with its sign was later included on the RAF Valley flight simulator and was noticed by the then Prince Charles (now King Charles the III in case you've forgotten) on a visit which sparked a further rash of news reports and more waves of avian visitors.

above: excellent pic (not one of mine!) over Steve’s house where the faded paint on his barn roof is still just readable.

Llanbedr has recently upgraded from airport to Spaceport, raising the possibility of even more exciting visitors. I'm tempted to write “Piss off ET” on a shed roof just to see who comes to have a look. I shouldn't complain really, after all is said and done they are training to save us (the RAF, not the aliens). Not sure from whom or what but thumbs up anyway!

Many thanks for reading. Let me know if you have similar concerns where you are or, if you’re local to Coed Y Brenin, have spotted anything interesting, intriguing or just downright odd going on in the forest. Next time, a suite of episodes from the patafiction, The Great Takeover Of The Place, which should take us to End Of Part One! Till then, thanks again and hwyl!

1. As an aside and a minor rant, all too often the air ambulance is called out to “rescue” people who have got into difficulty through their own failure to take responsibility for their own actions. Setting off up Cader Idris in flip flops, shorts and a t-shirt, an hour or so before dusk, without a map, compass, torch or any common sense is a perfect plan for causing entirely unnecessary trouble for the mountain rescue teams (all volunteers) and the air Ambulance (funded entirely from donations). Add in a flat mobile phone battery and the usual local weather when mists can desend to cloak the mountain in minutes, or that entirely unpredictable event of it getting dark and the expedition will inevitably end in tears, necessitating a potentially dangerous extraction and putting additional lives at risk.

2. The Mach Loop is roughly equivalent to the Isle of Man TT motorcycle races but for fighter pilots. Basically, you can legally fly your weapon of mass destruction at ridiculously low heights above the ground, on a loop taking in several well known viewpoints, waggling your wings as you approach Talyllyn Pass where dozens of fans are perched precariously on ledges, poised to take photographs of your awesome display of machismo...yawn.