Despite all our best efforts, it’s been yet another few months since our last update. There’s no real excuse, other than there’s been lots going on! Here’s news of what’s been happening, and what we’ve got coming up for the rest of the year.
Our past few months!
Wee Skelfs
As usual, school holidays mean risky play on our site, and we had lots of fun with villages in the woods, charcoal admiration, and loads of creations. The value of risky play is being recognised more and more, with benefits including better physical and mental health and improved social and cognitive development. And it’s great fun! We’ll be back in the Spring holidays for 2027, so watch this space for booking and dates.
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Craft workshops
2026 has been great for our craft workshops! We’ve changed our approach so now we have multiple on the same day, meaning different crafters can hear about what others are learning and creating a great atmosphere on site. We’re doing the same in 2027, and our main programme is now live! We’re also working on a few new ideas, so keep an eye open for those. Thanks to everyone who came along and took part in a workshop this year - you were all magnificent!
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Volunteering
Volunteering has also come into its own this year, thanks to support from external funding. We’ve been able to have sessions more or less weekly, which has been amazing. We’re still going with our Friday sessions, so if you want to get involved this year, you can! And, along with Fridays, we’re planning some weekend sessions for next year. All you have to do is sign up to volunteering and you’ll get the updates!
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The Great Scottish Craft Hoolie
We had a fantastic weekend back in August, filled with workshops galore, great company, and great fun! We trialled the first ever Cosy Cheeks Club - a communal peg loom experience - which was a major success. And we even managed to make some money to feed into other activities! So we’re doing it all again next year. Dates are already confirmed: 13-15 August 2027!
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Teenage Dirtbags
Teenage Dirtbags is back this winter, and we’re building a new blacksmithing workshop on our site. We’ve just started this set of sessions, so if there’s a teenager in your life who’d like to get out into the woods and learn some practical skills, then sign them up! It’s friendly, safe and lots of fun.
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It’s coppice season!
The start of Autumn takes us out into the woodlands to start our coppice work. And this year, it’s been supercharged! We received some local development funding to support this work, so we’ve been able to take on some extra help - in the form of Craig and Alice - to help us cut, process, and sort the coppiced sticks and make them into products (more of that later). This extra support has helped us to get one coppice site completely cut already, so we’re looking for additional sites to get stuck into.
For anyone who’s unsure about what it is, coppicing is one of the earliest forms of woodland management, used for thousands of years to provide a sustainable source of timber. Coppice is created by cutting trees to ground level, creating a ‘stool’ and encouraging new shoots to grow. This is done on a rotation, with different sections of a larger area cut each year. As well as providing a completely renewable timber resource, coppicing also has significant benefits for nature. Not only does it increase the health and longevity of the trees being coppiced, it has also been linked to improved biodiversity, encouraging the re-emergence of woodland flowers and the creation of new habitats for insects, birds and small mammals.
Coppicing was a major industry until the early 1900s, when industry replaced labour intensive natural materials with cheaper synthetics and imports, and there has been little or no coppicing activity in Scotland for over 100 years. We’re trying to change that, one stick at a time!
As well as the coppice cutting, we’ve also got quite a few related projects on the go, from working with primary school pupils to survey biodiversity in the coppice to engaging with national organisations on the role of coppicing in the climate crisis. We’ve got more funding applications in the pipeline: we want to work with community-owned woodlands to help them establish in-rotation coppice sites and make best-use of low value timber through charcoal making; we want to map areas of unmanaged hazel coppice in the local area; and we want to develop resources to help raise awareness of the many benefits that coppicing can have, for nature and the planet, for individual health and wellbeing, and for communities.
And we need your help! If you want to get involved in cutting the coppice, you can volunteer with us at one of our sites. If you have any hazel on your land that could be managed, get in touch and we’ll come and see it. And if you want to use hazel instead of plastic or imported products, then check out our online shop - we have sticks, hurdles, and board games!
Coming up!
As well as coppicing, we’re gearing up for the festive season and we’ve extended our range of products, to include new craft kits and even a new game. You can buy them all online or you can come to see us at one of the many markets we’ll be doing over the next few weeks.
And in the new year, we have an employability programme starting, open to anyone aged 16+ who wants to learn about timber framing and charcoal. We’ll have details online soon!
