Facilitating military training is therefore our primary role as MOD foresters. Military personnel must be prepared to fight in all circumstances: day or night, urban or rural, out in the open or under cover and training in woodlands is part of that. Once big enough, these are then planted in areas where they can grow freely, and contribute to my woodland legacy. I even have a personal nursery of hundreds of trees I’ve found growing in places where they wouldn’t have survived. One of my goals is to get as many trees in the ground as I can before I leave this mortal coil. Thirty years later, I still love forestry and trees! It’s not unusual for me to be out and about in my working day and see a tree I planted a quarter of a century ago. I was lucky enough to get a placement working in MOD forestry as part of that course, so when an MOD job came up a couple of years after I graduated, I jumped at it.
I originally studied painting and then photography, but soon realised this didn’t suit me so I sold my camera gear and bought chainsaws – as you do! I then spent a few years in Scotland and elsewhere working as a forestry contractor, before heading to forestry college. Catterick is where my MOD career started, initially as a forestry student then returning a few years later as the Catterick Training area forester. I’m based at Catterick, although I do spend a great deal of time on the road, travelling to other parts of the MOD estate, working with the three regional foresters who make up the rest of the MOD Forestry Department. The cultural value of this resource is often linked to the historical use of the sites, and many magnificent veteran and specimen trees contribute to the overall landscape of sites such as RAF College Cranwell and RMA Sandhurst. Although impossible to accurately count, we have at least 60 million trees in the UK alone. Most of our training areas have large blocks of forestry planted specifically for military training, but we also have large areas of urban and amenity woodland around our barracks, Service Family Accommodation homes and garrison towns. I bet you didn’t know that 'forester' was a real job in the Ministry of Defence, but if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense - the MOD’s vast estate has over 18,000ha of woodland. A Gurkha recruit from ITC Catterick moving across woodland plantation.
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