We are working on our first Management Plan for the woods which will guide our work for the next 10 years. The Plan will set out what we are trying to achieve, how we will do it and define the priority areas of work. We wanted to gather everyone’s views now to make sure that we have a good level of agreement in the community about how to manage the woods. We publicised the  consultation widely - see, for example, here. We have also commissioned further tree survey work and forestry expertise to feed into preparation of the Plan. 

During the community consultation conducted in March - April 2021 we got 136 individual responses. There was a very substantial level of agreement with the management proposals we set out - in summary:

• 97% of people either agreed, or strongly agreed, with our proposed vision statement
• 95% either agreed, or strongly agreed, with the four proposed management objectives
• Conservation of the woods was the most popular of the four management objectives - but they were all supported strongly
• all the individual management proposals were supported by at least 80% of people - some found favour with 97% of people (e.g. we should manage woods to encourage more wildlife)
• we got about 215 individual comments with some really good ideas on what we should and shouldn't do in the woods
• we've now got some great data on the level of support for some fairly controversial issues - e.g. 95% of people agree we should actively discourage the dumping of garden waste in the woods.

Click the links to read the main report with graphs (Annex 1), the individual comments (Annex 2) and the response from the Community Council (Annex 3). We aim to finalise the Plan and submit it to Scottish Forestry by the end of June 2021.

 

The documents and links below may also be useful to help think about the management of the woods:

• Maps: The map here might help you think about the proposals - there are further maps here
• Early consultation work: We first undertook community consultation in February 2019, supported by the Forestry Commission Scotland and advised by our friends from Abriachan Woods Trust. You can find the full report here.
• Report by the Woodland Trust Scotland. An expert ecologist visited the woods in Summer 2020 and wrote a report with management recommendations that you can see here.
• The Land Commission for Scotland has done a case study on our woods here  and developed Good Practice Guidelines for Charities that own and manage land which we have found useful and will follow in finalising our Plan - more information here

Thanks again to Scottish Forestry who are supporting the preparation of the Management Plan.