Cairn in Hardhill Wood

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 5 Nov 2021

Hectares are usually described in terms of football pitches these days. Whereas an acre is about the size of half of the playing area of the average sized football pitch, a hectare is often given as the area of a whole football pitch including the grass behind the goals and beyond the touch lines, or sidelines. (Theoretically a football pitch could be square, but due to rules imposed by international, national, and regional football bodies, pitches are generally about 115 x 75 yards in dimension with a bit of leeway given in both directions.) If you submit pictures to Geograph though, things become far simpler - a hectare is exactly the same as a centisquare, which is a hundredth part of a grid-square, measuring 100 x 100 metres. This small broadleaf wood comes in at about 10 hectares. Cairns like this are extremely common these days, and generally have something to do with one of the Queen's umpteen jubilees, or the millennium. This one, though, was something of a curiosity. It has the Scout logo - which can just be made out on its right side - engraved on one stone, with 'N East' imprinted below the logo, and a handful of other engraved stones and bricks throughout, which all denote Scout troops in and around Aberdeenshire - '1st Banff Scouts' and '1st Laurencekirk' are visible here. According to the Woodland Trust website, which handily also contains information on a lot of other publicly designed woodlands, it is one of six decorative cairns representing the Scout regions of Scotland. This is because in 1999 local Scouts planted all the trees here, which must have taken some doing. Presumably all the Scout troops marked on the stones were involved in the project, and get an honourary name-check in all the other woods. The reason I never put links in my write-ups, and therefore end up writing so much, is because of the wholly unnecessary (so it seems to me, anyway) practise of constant renaming and rebranding, undertaken by almost every organisation out there. This is a case in point. At the time, the wood was planted on behalf of the Central Scotland Forest Trust. This then renamed itself the Central Scotland Green Network Trust and is now called Green Action Trust. It seems to be quite a force for good though, despite its identity crisis.

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