Hi Guys

[davetb]

You are all making me feel good, with these huge prices.
We bought our 39 acre woods through Cleggs about 5 years ago.
It's 30 acres ancient woodland - hazel / ash / oak / birch / elm and 9 acres PAWS (Sitka spruce).
It's a few miles North of Monmouth, just in Herefordshire.
There were 3 bidders invited to submit sealed bids above £120,000.
We were successful for about £3,400 an acre.
Beautiful bluebells and wood anenomes for hundreds of metres persuaded us to considerably stretch ourselves, financially.
It now seems pretty cheap. No regrets.

[smojo]

Hi Smojo, I see from a previous post that you were in Telecoms and after your last post I guess you were a service engineer?
I am a partner in a telecoms installation and maintenance company, luckily though I am out on sites during the day and my business partner who is office bound during the day with paperwork and Tec support does the callouts after hours!
What systems did you support?

I worked as a transmission engineer. 28 years with BT, then contracting for 4 years after taking the money and running in 1994 and finally about 10 years in a small bespoke IT solutions company which was great until they got taken over by a USA company and it all turned to ratshit. I mostly worked on Marconi SDH kit - SMA16, 64 etc fibre optic WAN systems, Ciena and Huawei DWDM stuff.

[smojo]

I still think at £10k an acre woods are relatively cheap

Yes compared to the ones in the Lake district which tend to be about 12K. You don't particularly get better woods there - often they are plantations that have been monoculture species and have been felled and just recovering but I guess the rural area bumps price there. I reckon mine I just snuck in a bargain at 8.5K/acre even though a month before they were selling at 7.75K

I heard that there are some coming up in Staffordshire soon. Maybe not too far to travel from Leicester?

[boxerman]

Thanks for all the advice, guys. I do agree that it would be good to jump in now but I simply don't have the funds yet and I'd hate to re-mortgage the house for this and, as I'm self employed, I doubt I'd get a mortgage anyway....

Having spent much of the last couple of nights browsing the net just to get a feel for things it does look like oldclaypaws is right unless I was very lucky - it was just an impression I was getting..

I should probably start a new thread for this but as there's already one or two viewing can I just ask a quick one here? Browsing the net I did come up with a 2 acre plot about 1 hour and a half away that's coming up for auction - the 'offers over' figure was pretty low and I could probably up that by a little but suspect it'll climb beyond my reach. I also suspect that it's a non-starter because it's in a conservation area and 'the majority of trees' are subject to a preservation order - I'm guessing that this would simply create a nightmare scenario where I couldn't actually do a thing without requesting permission but I don't really understand the implications of such things so any advice that anyone could offer on that would be useful.

[oldclaypaws]

If you mean the one at Holloway, Martock and your budget is around £7000, looks like a non-starter. Its surrounded by posh houses and the chances are two or more householders will want it. I reckon it'll go £25,000 plus. The estimate of £5000 is daft to attract bids. Anything done in there will have all the neighbours looking over the fence in judgement, and every rev of a chainsaw will have a petition going. Apart from the TPO on 'most of the trees' it also has a footpath right across it, and being in a conservation area will prohibit a shed. Its also on a very steep incline making log extraction very tricky without crampons.

Don't wish to be unkind, but it does sound as if your budget is currently rather minimal and you'll have to save up quite a while before having a realistic chance of acquiring a pleasant wood on your own. Unfortunately thats just the way it is, they're not cheap, and going up rapidly. To have a degree of choice I reckon you need around £40,000+.

[boxerman]

Many thanks claypaws - don;t think we're talking of the same one cos I've never heard of Martock but the description sounds similar and your reply is much what I expected but as a total innocent I figured it was best to know before wasting time or making a major mistake..

EDITED - just realised Martock that was probably a deliberate typo so, yes, we probably are talking of the same place.

And, no that's not unkind - simply realistic - My thinking has been in the region of £40,000 to get anything worthwhile which is why I say I don't currently have the funds and am looking 2 or 3 years away.

[oldclaypaws]

Assumed it was this one???

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-29743884.html

[boxerman]

That's the one......

[oldclaypaws]

Looks like the house next to it could buy the wood by rustling through their milk money pot.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.101383,-1.509048,3a,75y,17.15h,95.91t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sf_99CXuviIVJAzyU18mDRw!2e0?hl=en

[boxerman]

Isn't Google Earth a wonderful thing?? I suspect it will be a very useful tool in the search for woods over the coming years as it can reveal a lot that no-one tells you....