Qualla: Kielder Forest

Kielder Forest: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit en:User:The Boy that time forgot, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the early 1930s, men from the closed shipyards of Tyneside and the silent mines of Durham boarded trains north into Northumberland and were put to work planting trees. They lived in hutted camps run by the Ministry of Labour, one of 38 Instructional Centres scattered across Britain to keep the unemployed busy and useful. The land they planted had been grouse moor and sheep run for centuries, treeless and windswept. The men were not foresters. They were shipwrights and pitmen learning to dig holes in peat. Their camp eventually disappeared underneath Kielder Water when the reservoir was filled in the 1970s. The trees they planted now cover 250 square miles, the largest man-made forest in England, and roughly half of all England's red squirrels live among them.

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Image: en:User:The Boy that time forgot | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kielder Forest: A Strategic Reserve of Timber

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter McDermott, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Forestry Commission was founded in 1919 to address a crisis the First World War had laid bare: Britain had almost no domestic timber. Trenches, pit props, railway sleepers, every kind of military and industrial need had been met by imports that submarines could cut off in wee...

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Image: Peter McDermott | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kielder Forest: A Sea of Sitka Spruce

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Taras Young, CC BY-SA 4.0. Sitka spruce, Picea sitchensis, covers seventy-five per cent of the planted area. It is a North American species, native to the Pacific coast from Alaska to California, that thrives in the damp gloom of northern Britain in a way few native conifers can. Norway spruce and lodgepol...

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Image: Taras Young | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kielder Forest: Squirrels, Ospreys, and a Possible Lynx

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter McDermott, CC BY-SA 2.0. Kielder is the last great English stronghold of the red squirrel. Around half of England's red squirrel population lives in the forest, sheltered from the grey squirrels that have displaced them almost everywhere else by virtue of Kielder's vast scale and the active management of...

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Image: Peter McDermott | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kielder Forest: Killer Kielder

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter McDermott, CC BY-SA 2.0. Among rally drivers, the forest has another name. The gravel tracks that the foresters use to extract timber make some of the most demanding rally stages in Britain. Long fast straights tempt drivers into speeds they cannot hold; the corners are deceptive; the ditches beside the ...

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Image: Peter McDermott | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kielder Forest: Castle, Skyspace, Dark Sky

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oliver Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0. Kielder Castle Visitor Centre is an eighteenth-century hunting lodge built by the Duke of Northumberland at the head of the North Tyne valley. A great football match between the men of Tynedale and Redesdale is reported to have taken place at the castle in 1790, presumably withou...

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Image: Oliver Dixon | CC BY-SA 2.0