THE NEW FORESTRY. 1 1 1 



highest parts of the forest, and not in the uphill and downhill 

 way so often seen on estates. Highways and railways usually 

 traverse the lower slopes of hills, or the valleys, and the advan- 

 tage of having forest roads laid out as described is that timber 

 waggons go up empty and come down loaded. Alternating 

 steep ascents and descents greatly lengthen a journey and add 

 enormously to the cost of haulage and road repairs. Horses 

 have, of course, to be employed in hauling timber,! and in. 

 Yorkshire, where this work is well understood, six horses are, 

 as a rule, employed to draw two waggons, each waggon 

 usually carrying from two to three tons of timber, or from 

 eighty to one hundred and twenty cubic feet. The reason of 

 so many horses being required is generally the uneven nature 

 of the roads and their being laid out in the wrong place, as, 

 for example, when a road through a wooded valley traverses, 

 with many ups and downs, the hillside half-way between its 

 summit and its base, instead of the bottom of the valley. In 

 a situation of this kind the timber from the underside of the 

 road has to be dragged up from the ravine to the road by 

 heavy tackling of blocks and pulleys attached to standing 

 trees, which are often injured thereby. Work like this takes 

 up much time, is arduous and expensive, and very trying to 

 horses. Then when the waggons are loaded and despatched, 

 one has to be unyoked at every incline and the six horses 

 attached to one waggon to pull it to the top, and then unyoked 

 again to return for the second waggon, and so on, as often as 

 may be necessary. The road gets torn up also by the horse's 

 feet in the ascent and ploughed up by the slipper or brake in 

 the descent, entailing extensive road repairs. In Germany, 

 on the Hartz Mountains, the roads have, as far as practicable, 

 a continuous winding ascent, and the trees are not dragged up 

 to the roads but are slid down to them and loaded on to timber 

 waggons drawn by oxen — the loads equalling those drawn by 

 the same number of horses in England, only the road being 

 downhill the work is easy. 



Shooting rides we have elsewhere recommended to be 

 twelve feet wide, but main wood-roads should not be less than 

 sixteen feet wide, in order to allow vehicles to pass each other, 

 and they should have a twenty-four-inch deep drain at each 

 side on soft or retentive land. Main roads do not require to 

 be deeply macadamised, as heavy traffic, is not frequent on 

 them, and experience shows that the traffic is almost wholly 

 confined to the narrow strip in the centre of the road where 

 the horses and the wheels travel. Breadth of wheel makes 



