A WOOD MINE

Grey River Argus, 26 April 1911, Page 8

A WOOD MINE

WORKING A TIMBER CLAIM,

KAURI IN THE GROUND

A very quaint industry is toeing carried on at Alfriston, about three faiHes |f»qm Manurewa, and about th;e same distance from Papakura. It almost lamounts to ftnininig timber from the ground, and its undertakers arc the Papakura Sawmilling- Company. Surrounding the company! s works is an area of about 1300 acres of flat swamp land, most of which is. nearly covered with timber, the remair'' of some growth of kauri timber. How it came there is . a mystery, and .no less mysterious is the beautiful state of preservation in which the timber exists.

A few days ago a News repo r ,^r visited the company's "claim," and saw the operations which ,are ibeing carried out. Generally speaking much of; the land on which the timber lies looks hopeless, for it is .covered, for great spaces, with a tangle of gnarled and twisted remains of huge roots and branched that give the landscape as'wi 'd ■ .ar:- aspect *s can be imagined. Nevertheless; hard, work and patience have . enabled some of the settlers to clear certain areas of the swamp, which have been drained and made very igood grazing land.

The value of the "claim" as .a tim,ber reserve, lies in the huge remains of; what -must have ben at one time a magnificent range of trees. Walking over the soft, damp ground, which seems to ' -be almost- wholly a kind of woody peat, and which: readily ■burns, one, comes every few yards upon a huge firm slab..; This is -the levelled surface of an old tree, which is destined, after burial for .who knows how many years, to be dragged forth io\ the day, •-('arid converted to the fulfillment of human need:"- • • -

Jn nearly all rases . the limber, found consists ot a heavy butt, with the roots spreading" away from it, and a taperingr mass of timber. The situation and position of the trees is remarkable, • but rit is not more so than the . fact tl • at .the timber in tfura is in the. best possible condition. In a ifew coses decay .has eaten below the general level, but that appears to 'be- exceptional. The swamp has preserved the timber wonderfully,, and even the.; baric, though it is brittle, still remains op many of- the t-inks, and looks quito fresh.

The timber, is ■ got; ou- by cutting it jinto suitable 7 er>gths its it lies in tne ground, and. then.,hßulin.Gf it out with winding gear, and, pulling it by the same agency to the company's sawmill. To .do this, a line of wire rope ~uns a good half mile over the

-There are plenty of buried trees on in the neighbourhood of the "wood-mine," and some of them are of enormous size. One of the biggest yet found is now bein^f cut up on a farm a mile or so away from the mill. The butt, where the tree was cut, is i abou't 12ft thick, and the log 1 has to be split into sections, and cut into short lengths for removal ; and the men who own it expect to cut at leost 6000 superficial feet out of its 30 ft of length. The surface and bark of this tree was found to

be remarkably well preserved, and beneath it, were found pieces of the familiar parasite Kie-Kie, in a state that would lead to the supposition that they had been buried only a bw months.

Such huge blocks of timber are valuable, and pay well for the work of, extracting- them and cutting them up, for the demand for kauri is wellnigh insatiable, and the timber j^ of the best grade.