The Wild Croft, Skerray, Sutherland
The Wild Croft is an 8 acre woodland croft that crofters Al and Aurore Whitworth moved to in 2018. ‘Our intention was to live closer to the land, growing our own food, fuel and fodder,’ Al explains. ‘This has now been extended to include basketry as Aurore became a basketmaker and we grow basketry willow too. Our aim is for the croft to be resilient with low external inputs. Any surplus that we grow or harvest will be sold locally, but making a profit or a living from the croft is not the primary aim.’
There is approximately 2 ha of mixed coppice on the croft and a further 1.5 ha on a neighbour’s croft that Al and Aurore have use of. Cutting started in 2023 so they are two years into establishing the coppice, which will be a 10–15-year rotation. They also have several areas of basketry willow which are cut annually.
The main aim for the coppice is to supply its owners with firewood which provides all of their heating, hot water and cooking – that means a lot of wood. Once in rotation, Al and Aurore expect to have a surplus of timber and this will be used for making charcoal, coppice products for gardens and green woodworking when the time comes. The basketry coppice is to supply Aurore’s basketmaking which is her main job. She sells the baskets locally as well as running workshops. She is self-sufficient in willow, with the exception of some specialist buff willow which is bought in.
‘We became interested in coppice when trying to figure out how best to manage the croft woodlands which varied in age and type and were on very wet ground which floods in winter, making them unsuitable for crops or livestock most of the year. Coppicing made sense as the material is kept at a size that can be handled easily with basic, small machinery that doesn’t churn the ground up, and the short(ish) rotations mean that it is achievable to supply ourselves fairly quickly,’ Al says. ‘We have been buying firewood while getting set up, but hope not to buy any more wood in from now on.’
Set-up
Most of the coppice is alder and birch, but there is also some goat willow, aspen, rowan and ash. These woodlands were planted by the previous tenant under woodland grant schemes in the 1990s and early 2000s. Some areas have failed and Al and Aurore are replanting these mainly with alder as it is extremely wet and drainage is not feasible, limiting the choice of species.
The wider croft woodland has a much more diverse mix of around 50 species. Al and Aurore have planted areas of hazel, oak, sweet chestnut, and non-native alders which will be coppiced or pollarded in the future. The basketry willow beds, cover approximately 500 sq metres, which are cut annually for their own use and include over 50 varieties. Some hybrid willows are grown for shelter and woodchip production on a 3–5-year rotation.
Al and Aurore also pollard and coppice trees ad hoc in other areas of the croft when managing for shade in their fruit and vegetable growing areas. These are used for firewood, woodchip and poles for use around the croft and they hope to experiment with tree hay in the future.
Al says: ‘Coppicing has opened up the woodland and the regrowth has mostly been excellent. As the woodland wasn’t deer fenced originally, some of the original trees had very poor form due to being regularly munched so coppicing is also having the effect of ‘resetting’ the trees and I hope that the regrowth is of much higher quality.’
Working it
Starting the coppice was a steep learning curve and climate-related information was sparse. ‘The hardest thing to get our head around to start with was dividing the croft up into coupes and how big they needed to be for our needs (and what we could manage), and how long the rotation might need to be as there was very little information available for our climate,’ Al recalls.
A small area of ash in a different part of the croft was cut as a trial in 2019 with an axe and handsaw. The regrowth on these has since been cut again and used as hedging stakes for a small 50-metre hedge laid in 2023. Unfortunately the latest regrowth is showing signs of ash dieback.
Al and Aurore cut the first coupe (0.5 acre/0.25 ha) of the main woodland in 2023 and plan to cut one area per year. This first area was planted in the mid 1990s so some trees (mainly alder) were a fair size. The cutting itself was straightforward, but extraction was tricky as there were no paths or tracks into the woodland, which was mound-planted with awkward drains criss-crossing it. Buying a small tractor made a huge difference and more access tracks into other areas are slowly being developed. The croft is also very wet, so extraction could not even start until mid July as the ground was sodden after a very wet spring.
‘When we moved to the croft it was very clear that we needed to deer-fence the woodland urgently before we could do anything as we have high populations of red deer. This was grant aided, but we also did the work ourselves to keep the cost down,’ Al says.
The coppice is cut with battery-powered chainsaws and hand saws. The timber is stacked in the coppice until the ground is dry enough to extract it. Al and Aurore have a small 1970s Kubota tractor and mini log trailer to extract the timber in 1.5-metre lengths which are then processed using a tractor-mounted circular log saw. The firewood is dried in an open-ended polytunnel, which is a luxury, but the space also doubles up as a tractor shed and dry area for the hens in winter. Once seasoned the following year, the firewood is moved again to a log store next to the house. ‘It is annoying to have more moves than necessary, but the layout of the croft makes this the only way to do it and we are trying to make it as efficient as possible,’ Al explains.
Al and Aurore do all the work themselves and a few friends help out as labour exchanges. All the brash is chipped using a petrol Rock Machinery chipper which has been an excellent investment.
‘A good supply of woodchip is almost as important to us as the firewood and it is used throughout the croft for paths, mulch, compost etc. As we are trying to be a resilient croft and lowering our external inputs, having a good supply of this gold dust is amazing and we’d recommend Ben Raskin’s Woodchip Handbook if you’re interested in knowing what you can do with woodchip,’ Al says.
The basketry willow beds were planted into a biodegradable membrane, which has worked very well and they are now well established. They are mostly cut annually by hand with secateurs. In 2024, on a volunteer weekend, 12 local people came to help out to cut, bundle and grade the willow, which was a huge help and great fun. This is now planned to be an annual event.
Lessons learnt
Al and Aurore started with very little practical knowledge of woodland management or coppicing. ‘We naively thought that a strimmer and wheelbarrow would be enough to tackle an eight-acre croft!’ Al recalls. ‘We should have bought a small tractor earlier, but money was tight and we were juggling multiple jobs so realistically it probably couldn’t have happened much sooner. The Highlands and Islands Woodland Handbook was a massive help to planning the croft and understanding what was possible, but it only came out once we’d been here a few years. It would have been beneficial to visit other woodlands being used in a similar way, but it was hard to find any.’
With little previous experience it was very daunting to chop down semi mature trees and believe that they would regrow. So Al and Aurore were quite tentative in the first years. ‘We now feel much more confident to modify the woodlands to suit our aims as we see the croft thriving with the extra management, though we don’t regret the slower start – knowledge built slowly by observing the land is essential,’ Al says.
Al and Aurore now have a mobile hen house which they tow with the tractor, moving through the coppice and protecting the temporary runs with electric fencing. As they did not plan this from the start, paths and woodland rides are not wide enough for it and it is tricky to access a lot of the croft with it. It would have been good to plan this earlier and put in a proper network of paths and rides, with straight fence lines, perhaps hiring in a small excavator to do the bulk of the work.
One of the biggest thrills has been seeing the amount of natural regeneration that followed from deer fencing the croft. Areas full of tussocky grass and heather that seemed impossible to tackle to plant trees in are now full of six-feet high birch and pine with zero effort from us. Oak, holly, whitebeam and aspen have all spread and the wet summer of 2024 resulted in a surge of alder regen.
The basketry willow has been a success, but Al and Aurore underestimated the amount of space needed to dry and store the willow so they now need to add more storage to the willow workshop.
Future vision
A huge milestone will be to have a few years of not buying firewood, Al says. ‘We have upgraded our wood-burning range to a more efficient model, and added a lot of solar panels, which have reduced our demand for firewood in summer, making it a much more manageable proposition to be self-sufficient.’
Al and Aurore are still planting coppice now, and do not have enough coupes yet and look forward to when that work is completed. At the moment they are planting one area per year, using home-grown trees. Some of the alder grown from seed when they first moved to the Wild Croft is now 15 feet tall. The ground left to plant is quite challenging, being waterlogged and very rough, so it is slow progress.
In 2026, Al and Aurore plan to introduce a small number of pigs to the croft and these will be integrated into the coppice areas. They will use a small breed (kunekune) which tend not to dig a lot or damage trees. ‘We hope to experiment with them in coppice regrowth areas but also to help with establishment of new areas. We already have hens and ducks in the coppice which do a great job of weed control and fertilising. We would like to experiment and extend the agroforestry element of the croft by underplanting coppice areas with edible plants and fruit. These could be for forage for animals such as pigs, cattle and hens, and for our own use,’ Al explains.
Al has had the parts for a small Hookway charcoal retort fabricated and hopes to build this in 2025 and start making charcoal, mainly for their own use but also to sell some locally eventually.
They have started running informal woodland management workshops on the croft and these have been popular so they plan to try starting a small coppice volunteer group this winter to help with coppicing.
Al is a carpenter and would love to make and sell some greenwood craft products from the coppice one day if the quality of the poles is sufficient. ‘We also have plans to improve paths and access through the croft and open it up for the public eventually,’ he says.
Contact Details
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You can also contact Al & Aurore directly via their website thewildcroft.co.uk
Coppice Case Study Project
This case study is part of Reforesting Scotland’s Coppice Case Study Project, which aims to map out Scotland’s coppice woodlands and share knowledge by publishing case studies. You can read more about the project and other case studies here.