THE ENGLISH BUSHMAN.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXVII, Issue 17289, 3 October 1916, Page 10

THE ENGLISH BUSHMAN.

FORESTS FELLED BY STEAM. (London “Daily Mail.”) Deep into tho Ercall Woods, some six miles from Newport, a strange little party of adventurers wandered, and nt their coming the pheasants, mightily astonished, scurried into the undergrowth. A couplo of bronzed, sinewy foresters, with broad axes on their shoulders, led the way. Following came a feather-legged cart-horso dragging a Spencer-Hopwood water tube boiler attached to which was a weird-looking contrivance of clamped steel which looked rather Uko a cross between a machine gun and a. sewing machine. To this deadly instrument a giant saw was fixed, and behind it there trailed 120 ft of hosepipe. This intruder in these enchanted woods, which disturbed tho foresters almost a.s much as it scared the pheasants. was out on war work—Rnnsome's “waistcoat pocket” tree-feller, one might describe it. It is the “’cutest” little machine imaginable. Plantations— forests—-tremble and fall before it: and it came to the Ercall Woods to-day to give a trial of its labour-saving and time-saving under Government auspices. Tho trial was completely satisfactory. NEED FOR TIMBER, In England tho timber problem- has come to a head. Vast quantities are needed, mainly for pit work in the coal mines and trench and transport work in Franco. With the pre-war Scandinavian and German facilities no longer available, the Government has had to look at home fcfr its timber, to find means to get it quickly and cheaply. The Home-Grown Timber Committee lias taken this task in hand with commendable thoroughness, it Isas a mandate over all our historic woodlands, and to-day ninety forests in England and Wales alone (not to mention Scotland) are under the battle-axo. All the woodmen and gamekeepers whom the toll of the war has spared aro swinging the axe, cutting and crosscutting. and doing their best. But there aro speedier, if less romantic, ways that flashing the broad axe. There are neater vfays, too; and that is why I was among the brown-skinned men in these whispering glades to-day watching with some heartache the whirring blade of Rnnsome’s waistcoatnoelect forest- exterminator wiping out Ercall Woods, TWO MEN AND A FORESTER.

There is no place for sentiment jn these swift, remorseless tlnys. Tile war has got to ho won, though immemorial forests fall. And before high noon Ercall TVood and all its tall ancf beautiful Scotch firs was crashing about my ears. Screaming, the peasants fled. Two men, and ono forester born to tho woodsman’s craft (to guide the fall of the giants), are all that are needed to work this swift, and cunning little engine of destruction. The boiler is fed with woodland refuse, an eighty-pound head of steam is forced through the hosepipo to work tho saw; the little machine can bo moved from tree to tree and can clear a whole acre without the heavy boiler iming shifted ; and each tree is cut through clean, level with the ground. There is no waste and no “raggedness.”

A TREE A MINUTE. 1 timed the firs to-day as they crashed to earth: tho machine . slicod through, on tho avorago. a fir a minute, and three minutes sufficed for tho stoutest giants tackled. Three skilled foresters working at full pressure with axe and hand saw reckon ten trees as a good day's labour: this machine, run bv a couple o-f men, will account for forty-five or fifty. And when it has felled tho tree it can bo turned on its side and converted to cross-cutting with equal celerity. It was invented bv that famous engineer, the Into Mr Allen Ransome. “The idea came to my father one morning during sermon time in church.” said Mr Geoffrey Ransome as wo stood together in tho forest watching its swift work this afternoon. “And he was so excited over it that hoNbegnn to work on the drawings there and then on the flyleaf of his prayer hook.”