Catalogue description Forestry Commission: Forest Histories and Working Plans

Forest histories were introduced in 1951 to record how forests coming under the authority of the Forestry Commission had been created, managed and developed. Parts of the forest history were intended to form part of a forest working plan, which not only has the function of describing the existing tree crops and conditions under which they are grown, but also specifies with varying detail, the work to be carried out during the period of the plan and provides for records to show what progress has been made.

The first working plan for a Forestry Commission forest was written in 1951 and the general preparation of plans was gaining momentum by the mid-1905s. The traditional working plan can be a very elaborate document which describes in detail the type and amount of operations which should take place in individual parts of the forest. However, for the majority of the Forestry Commission's forests, which in the early 1950s were predominantly composed of young crops and were still expanding as further land was acquired, working plans were not fully developed and contained only silvicultural information on the choice of species in relation to sites, a planting programme, a programme for the resumption of land which was tenanted, a thinning plan (where plantations have reached that stage) and provisions for fire control. The Working Plan Code which was introduced in 1960 laid down in detail the type of information which was to be included and the form in which it was to be presented.

The preparation of working plans for individual forests stopped in the late 1960s for a variety of reasons. First, it was found that with so much of the production going to relatively few large consuming industries it was easier to plan and control the flow of raw material at Conservancy level rather than at forest level. Secondly, the introduction of Management Tables which greatly simplified the forecasting of production, and the new Financial Control System took over much of the detailed functions of the working plan. Thirdly, the rapid rate of change in methods, particularly the introduction of mechanisation for timber felling and extraction, chemical weed control and the use of fertilizers on forest crops, would have resulted in detailed plans having to be drastically and frequently altered.

Conservancy plans, which deal with essentially the same topics as forest working plans, but in much broader detail, were introduced in 1968 and the production of individual forest working plans tended to lapse. Thus only a limited number of Forest Histories and Forest Working Plans were ever prepared and because of subsequent forest amalgamations often associated with a change of forest name, they may relate only to sections of present-day forests.