People's Postcode Lottery

George Anderson, PR and communications officer for Scotland, the Woodland Trust: This is Scotland’s rainforest. Here we’ve got hundreds of species growing on every available surface. A real explosion of biodiversity, and this is the way our country should be.

Henry Dobson, Loch Arkaig estate manager, the Woodland Trust: In the 1960s, North American trees were planted for timber through the remains of this ancient forest. And as they’ve grown up very fast, they’ve shaded out what’s left of these really delicate rainforest plants. We really need to act quickly to create a much bigger, resilient habitat to keep this rainforest going. It’s quite a challenging environment, not only because it’s so remote and so far from any roads. Also because of the huge volumes of logs that need to come out.

Simon Dakin, Blue Green Conservation: I’m Simon Dakin, and this is Tarzan. He’s my logging horse. We’re here at Arkaig Pine Forest working for the Woodland Trust where we are extracting timber through quite ecologically sensitive areas where you may not necessarily want larger machines going. Using the horse is very low impact. The lighter the touch, the better it is for the forest’s recovery.

Henry: We’re taking all the non-native timber away from the forest across the loch in a barge. And we are using big forestry machines, where needed, simply to restore the forest at this huge scale of work that’s needed.

Angela Mercer, Arkaig Community Forest: It’s crucial now that we’re trying to cut our carbon footprint, and using the barge is essential here because otherwise we’d have had to put a road right through the forest, which is just anathema really.

Henry: Having the oldest technology of taking logs out of the forest with the newest technology of the first freshwater barge, to have put in all that work over the years and finally see it pay off and see Tarzan the horse dragging logs down to this barge has really been a dream come true.