Forestry of the 1960’s in Highland Perthshire

The Perthshire I met in June 1962 was devoid of Motorways; steam trains still worked the branch lines and MOT tests for cars were far in the future. This story of my time with the Forestry Commission is really the sequence to my National Service in Germany that I wrote of in “Two Years” with the Pied Piper of Hameln. Forestry was changing; coal mining was scaling down and the labourintensive pit prop market was being replaced by the need for the more easily mechanised pulp wood to feed the new pulp mill outside Fort William. Timber Lorries were becoming both longer and heavier and the forest roads and bridges had to be strengthened to cope. The natural forests had been depleted by the demands of two world wars and the new forests planted on heather moors torn by tractors and giant ploughs. This was the world I worked in for eight years, and this is the story of the men and machines that made it possible.