Treeline Woodlands hosted Fuelwood’s open days north of the border on 7 and 8 July. The location was Baddinsgill Farm a few miles north of West Linton on the southern slopes of the Pentland Hills.
BADDINGSGILL Farm has been in the hands of the Marshall family for over a century and the heather-clad slopes are still home to a flock of hardy Scottish Blackface sheep. A herd – or fold, to use the correct Scots terminology – of Highland Cattle graze the better ground. There are enough customers in the vicinity of Edinburgh who are able and willing to pay a premium for locally produced meat. Sales of lamb and beef direct from the farm have so far proven to add considerable value to Baddinsgill’s traditional product.
Treeline Woodlands was an early diversification for the estate. Gavin Marshall set up the business in 1991 with a view to providing an integrated forestry management and contracting service for owners of smaller woodlands. His son Nick now runs the day-to-day Treeline operations – harvesting, planting, fencing material milling and firewood production.
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The increasing demand for the forestry and firewood machinery Treeline Woodlands supplies has led Nick Marshall to engage Nick Ironside to oversee the sales and engineering side of the business. The two Nicks have been friends since their teenage years and Ironside has seen Treeline Woodlands evolve, always keen to participate in the venture’s new projects if his other commitments allowed.
For two and a half years now, Ironside has been in charge of machinery sales and running the engineering side of the business. It was the acquisition of a Transaw from Fuelwood that formed the link between the Scottish forestry business and the Midlands-based equipment manufacturer.
“From the start, the idea was for Baddinsgill to form an open demonstration area for Fuelwood’s equipment and brands for potential customers in the north of England and Scotland,” explained Ironside. There was always plenty of woody material on site, he added, for genuine production trials of all the machines. Buyers could be sure that the investment they were making would up their margins, whether they were contracting or producing woodfuel-based products.
The pandemic and the implementation of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement caused considerable difficulty for machinery suppliers. Interpreting a whole new raft of rules and regulations and wading through reams of unfamiliar customs and VAT forms was a nightmare for importers, but more so for EU manufacturers exporting to the UK.
Predicting when – and even ‘if’ – imported goods and equipment would arrive was impossible.
Things have at last settled down and Nick Ironside noted that, when potential customers expressed interest, he now had the confidence to predict fairly accurately the lead time for machines from the various suppliers. Fuelwood’s purchasing tactics – predicting demand and ordering machinery and parts early – has smoothed most of the peaks and troughs and, among the regular loads of equipment sent north to Scotland, some machines may not yet be assigned to a customer. Given the current demand for firewood processing machinery, Ironside pointed out that nothing stays around very long in the Baddinsgill yard.
Fuelwood’s Ben Billing outlined the position of the Warwickshire-based company at the moment: “Since last year’s APF demo we just haven’t stopped! We had a very good show and we could see the market changing. The demand for firewood processing machinery has gone through the roof.
“Innovation and growth have always been a key element for Fuelwood and normally we would be upgrading and adding new machinery. We have about 25 staff now and as it happens the demand is such that the whole focus at the moment is on building the machines.The orders are there so we just have to go for it.”
The range of Fuelwood machinery constructed at the facility near Warwick was now forming the backbone of the company’s offering. Ben pointed out that Jeremy Slatem had put a reinvestment into the business to ensure a steady flow of imported machinery and parts. The same policy of early ordering of stock applied to all the raw material and components for the home-built ranges of equipment.
It meant an increased outlay of capital but as so many manufacturers are finding, few supply chains can nowadays be relied upon to respond to ‘just-in-time’ orders. Ben Billing suspected that the instability of interest rates was causing some customers to hold back on making decisions. He expected that financial pressures may, in the coming months, see the cancellation of some orders.
After a career with both the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Bank of Scotland, Stephen Clark set up Eagle Asset Finance in 1999. For almost 25 years he has concentrated on offering financial services to the forestry industry. Stephen felt that the current uncertainty was making it very difficult for both lenders and borrowers. He was not alone in feeling that the economy was entering choppy – if not uncharted – waters.
WM Rose and Sons was founded in 1923 and now supplies agricultural, construction and industrial machinery from its base near West Linton. The firm’s Alan Rose had come to Baddinsgill with a couple of new McCormick tractors to power logsplitters and a Wacker Neuson excavator to operate cone splitters. A Merlo MF 44.9 was on display.
A Merlo base machine had been supplied by WM Rose and Sons to one of the top Borders timber harvesting contractors as a carrier for a mulching contract on a clearfelled site.
Alan confirmed that the operation was surprisingly effective for such a reduced weight and highly mobile combination, and fuel efficiency was impressive. Mulcher fitment and forestry guarding were contracted to Field and Forest Machinery at Broxburn.
While Alan confirmed that his company was hoping to increase the number of machines it supplies to the forestry and firewood sector, he was concerned about the future of agriculture. Farming, like forestry, was always seen in economic terms as stable and predictable. So many years since the Brexit vote and, in all the countries of the UK, the future viability of farm businesses remains unclear.
Whatever the changes in land management systems over the next few generations, trees and timber seem destined to have more prominence in the Pentland Hills and generate income alongside the Black Faces and the Highlanders. The aspect of these moorlands has changed before, notably when the headwaters of the River Lyne were dammed in the 1930s to provide water for the town of Bathgate from the Baddinsgill Reservoir.
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For centuries before this, Baddinsgill, positioned on a major thoroughfare, was one of the most famous places in the Pentlands. Drovers, with cattle traded at the ‘trysts’ in Crieff and Falkirk, would reach the northern slopes of the Pentlands at a place now called New Venture. The climb was long and steep – as it still is for today’s long-distance hikers on the Cross Borders Drove Road.
The beasts, bound for Peebles, Hawick and the North of England, would make slow progress up to the high point at Cauldstane Slap and there was great relief when the roofs of Baddinsgill came into view above West Linton. The bleakest and most dangerous stage of the route – the Thieves Road – had been completed; hopefully with all the cattle accounted for.
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