15 November 2023

Contractors for Forestry and land Scotland (FLS) will be carrying out felling and extraction operations in Culbokie Woods  starting on Wednesday 15 November.

FLS have provided annotated maps and a key to show where the work will take place.  You can view and download the maps as a PDF file.  Page 4 shows the overall picture, pages 1 and 2 show the detail, and page 3 has the key to the annotations.

Work is expected to begin in the next two to three weeks, and the plan is for two phases of work to be completed within a six week window.

FLS have emailed Culbokie Community Trust and Ferintosh Community Council with the following information

We are still proposing to undertake some timber harvesting operations and roads improvement work in Culbokie over the coming months.

Both of these activities will have an impact on the access to the forest but we will look to manage this disruption and keep it to a minimum.  The most important element for me to consider is the health & safety of members of the public and our operators on site.  With that in mind we are looking to undertake the work in 2 phases.  This will allow access to some but not all of the forest at any time.  Hopefully it will allow enough access to keep regular users happy in the short term, but I know from experience this will feel like a major disruption during the period of the operations.  I’ve included a map of the 2 proposed operational phases of harvesting.  By phasing it this way we are attempting to manage the access and to achieve this we will deploy a combination of signage, diversions, physical barriers and banksmen.   

The scale of the operations are actually quite small and we would aim to have all the harvesting completed within a 6 week window.  This will depend on the availability of machines but it is looking like we could commence operations by the beginning of November.  After the harvesting operations are finished there will still be timber haulage from the forest and this will continue on until into the New Year. This will be managed with signage, and potentially physical barriers, but it doesn’t require the whole forest to be closed off.

Any enquiries should be directed to     paul.simon@forestryandland.gov.scot