Tree felling
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 @ 12:02 AM
At last! The dead chestnut is down, laid full length on the ground like a beached whale or an old elephant...and no damage done to man, beast or electricity cable either! This last point was our main concern and right up to the last minute we were spending a fortune trying to contact someone at Endesa to come and lower the line...in the end we had to get on regardless and luckily all went well.
Our friend Giles, a trained arboriculturalist, got up to about 30metres and carefully trimmed off the main overhanging branches. Steve had already put a rope onto one of them, so it pivoted in a very elegant fashion and dropped into the barranco; the other, bigger set of branches did catch the cable on the way down but there was enough slack for it to take the hit and bounce back up again. The final job was to bring down the rest of the tree, main trunk et al which Giles was able to do on the ground. He cut a 70 degree wedge on the side that we wanted it to fall (away from our neighbour's swimming pool), then chain-sawed the other side until there was just a sliver of wood holding it all upright. Then he hammered in a few iron wedges, swung the sledge at it a few times and ....down it crashed, to a round of cheers and claps. We were delighted and we now have a lot of firewood for next winter.
The other, live tree has also been trimmed down and cleaned out by Giles, adding to our supply. The next challenge is cutting it all up and hauling it up to the village. There is no vehicle access within 100 metres so it's a case of 'have wheelbarrow, will travel' and a lot of sweated labour. Our new daily workout!
A bit of the wood has already been burned on the village bonfire (the Chisco) but this was nothing compared to the Torviscon celebrations...bonfires blazing all through the town, fireworks and fairgrounds and hot chocolate...the winter cold has been kept at bay and we've all had a weekend of hangovers, but also lots of fun!