NESTLED in the heart of West Dorset surrounded by rolling hills is Prime Coppice, a 52-acre working woodland in the Marshwood Vale.

Explore it further and you’ll meet Kit Vaughan and Dr Ruth Fuller, the site’s owners.

The couple have owned Prime Coppice since 2011 and live on site with their two sons, three-year-old Alfred and Arran who is eight months.

The semi-natural ancient woodland has a long history as a working wood – having been coppiced for hundreds of years and managed for a range of products – but it has not been actively managed for the last 30 years.

Kit and Ruth are now working to restore the woodland, although doing so in a way you might not necessarily expect.

Kit said: “The woodland is a very beautiful and special site; so we’re using horses to be sensitive to the site and show that we can both produce timber and manage the wood sustainably.

“Over a three-day period last week we used horses to extract the oak timber which will now be processed into firewood and sawn into planks and beams.

“This must have marked 100 years since horses were last on the site. Using horses has a much smaller impact on the ground than using tractors and machinery, and working horses are ideally suited to steep sites, wet sites and environmentally sensitive areas.

“It also reduces compaction and damage to the woodland floor whilst giving no pollution from fossil fuels.”

Kit and Ruth aim to bring the coppice back into rotation, opening up the woodland rides and tracks and increasing the wildlife through careful management.

It is believed wood fuel can play an important part in home heating, with logs potentially being more than three times cheaper than heating with electric and at times up to 25 per cent cheaper than heating with oil.

Much of the wood at Prime Coppice is hazel and ash coppice with some large oak trees.

Coppicing is an ancient woodland management method where a tree is felled at ground level and then regrows over a period of years without needing to be replanted.

Ruth said: “Coppice products are used for many things including hurdles, pea and bean sticks and other craft uses plus charcoal and firewood.

“Coppicing is also very good for the woodland and its wildlife, with birds, insects and wild flowers all benefiting from managed intervention.

“Coppiced trees don’t grow well if shaded out by larger trees, so some of the large oak trees are being felled to give the coppice a new lease of life.”

Prime Coppice is a semi-natural ancient woodland consisting primarily of hazel coppice, ash and mature oak trees with other species including willow, silver birch, alder, hawthorn, blackthorn, aspen, spindle and Norway spruce.

But for both Kit and Ruth, the site is so much more than that.

The couple were looking for a woodland site for 10 years before they came across Prime Coppice.

Kit added: “I’ve always wanted to work in nature conservation, but this is a dream come true really.”

To help manage the wood, Kit and Ruth have a regular group called the ‘Working woodlanders’ who help to restore the woodland in exchange for wood fuel and coppice products.

  • For news about the working woodlanders, together with events and activities at Prime Coppice, visit the website: primecoppice.com
     
  • LAST Saturday Kit and Ruth held an open day for the public to come and explore the site.

Anyone interested could also experience first-hand the felling of large standard oak trees and their horse drawn extraction.

A horse logger visited Prime Coppice for the open day to extract some large oaks that are in the hazel coppice block being worked on this season.

People could also learn why and how to select and fell large oak trees in hazel coppice, how to process large trees for extraction and conversion and extracting timber on sensitive sites with horses.

In addition, an introduction to the use of horses for timber extraction was on offer.

Participants shared ideas and information amongst themselves and were amazed at how quickly and efficiently the horses were able to extract the wood.