Holly standing near our largest timber to date, from Hollywood’s 2nd thinning, January 2013

As you can see, some of our conifer trees are getting big. When our forest contractor Sean Hoskins and his fellow worker Conor Murphy, selectively felled some trees for Hollywood’s 2nd thinning in January, Conor asked if he could have our largest cut tree, in exchange for reducing his felling fee. “Sure”, I said, surprised. Its often easy to think that Ireland’s most common plantation tree, Sitka spruce, is not of value beyond firewood and pulp, particularly as it grows so fast in Ireland (this makes the timber less structurally strong) but Conor seemed impressed with the size of the timber and hauled it away.

I didn’t think any more of it until Sean sent me a few photos last week about what is happening to our first large timber tree.

I’m not allowed to tell just yet what the timber is being turned into but its pretty special.  Just wanted to show you below how the timber looks now after Conor working on it below.
Stay tuned, in a few weeks I’ll share with you what the timber was used for.

Conor Murphy creating! logs milled using an Alaskan mill with a husky 395 chainsaw and trimmed up with a smaller saw. (photo: Sean Hoskins)