Hafren Forest

Hafren Forest lies north-west of Llanidloes, an ancient market town in Mid Wales.

Hafren Forest

Overview

The forest covers around 40 square kilometres (15 square miles), and consists mainly of pine and spruce trees. It takes its name from the Afon Hafren (Welsh for 'River Severn') which rises in a deep peat bog approximately 800 metres (0.5 miles) outside western boundary of the forest, high on the slopes of Pumlumon, the highest mountain in Mid Wales.

History

The forest, planted in 1937, is continually changing with felling and planting of trees. The forest is also home to Bronze Age copper and lead mines,[1] most notably "Nant yr Eira" and possibly "Nant yr Rickett".

The creation of the forest in 1937 involved the purchase of twelve upland sheep farms, including "Rhyd y Benwch" which is now the location of a car park and picnic area.[2]

Although the farms were not left derelict, they could not provide enough accommodation for forest workers in this sparsely-populated area. At first, with the initial small size of the forest, enough workers could be found locally. Later, workers were transported from Llanidloes. This was unsustainable, and in 1948, the Forestry Commission decided to build a village near Staylittle, to house forestry workers. They employed an eminent architect, T. Alwyn Lloyd of Cardiff, to produce plans for a village that would eventually comprise eighty houses, a village shop, school and hall. As a first development, twenty houses were built on the site, with eight more a few miles away: these provided accommodation for half the workers. Construction began in 1949, with the first houses being occupied in 1951. The water supplies for the village, known as Llwyn-y-gog (or Llwynygog), were provided by damming of a nearby stream.[3][4]

The source of the River Severn, near Hafren Forest

Present day use

Although the forest still produces timber for Natural Resources Wales, it has also developed as a wildlife habitat and as a tourist attraction. The red kite is seen in the area, along with many other birds, plants and animals. There are numerous footpaths, and many bridleways that are popular for mountain biking and horse riding. Published walks include "The Source of The Severn", "Severn Breaks its Neck" and "The Blaenhafren Falls".[5]

The Wye Valley Walk finishes at Rhyd y Benwch in the forest.[6]

A quarry in the forest is used "explosion studies" by Aberystwyth University's Combustion Physics Group. This quarry had previously been used by British Aerospace.

Motor sport

The forest is a popular location for many motocross and 4x4 championships and rally events.

The forest is regularly used as a stage on the Wales Rally GB. In January 2013 BBC Top Gear used a Bentley Continental driven by Kris Meeke to cover the stage.[7]

gollark: Oh, and it's not a special case as much as just annoying, but it's a compile error to not use a variable or import. Which I would find reasonable as a linter rule, but it makes quickly editing and testing bits of code more annoying.
gollark: As well as having special casing for stuff, it often is just pointlessly hostile to abstracting anything:- lol no generics- you literally cannot define a well-typed `min`/`max` function (like Lua has). Unless you do something weird like... implement an interface for that on all the builtin number types, and I don't know if it would let you do that.- no map/filter/reduce stuff- `if err != nil { return err }`- the recommended way to map over an array in parallel, if I remember right, is to run a goroutine for every element which does whatever task you want then adds the result to a shared "output" array, and use a WaitGroup thingy to wait for all the goroutines. This is a lot of boilerplate.
gollark: It also does have the whole "anything which implements the right functions implements an interface" thing, which seems very horrible to me as a random change somewhere could cause compile errors with no good explanation.
gollark: - `make`/`new` are basically magic- `range` is magic too - what it does depends on the number of return values you use, or something. Also, IIRC user-defined types can't implement it- Generics are available for all of, what, three builtin types? Maps, slices and channels, if I remember right.- `select` also only works with the built-in channels- Constants: they can only be something like four types, and what even is `iota` doing- The multiple return values can't be used as tuples or anything. You can, as far as I'm aware, only return two (or, well, more than one) things at once, or bind two returns to two variables, nothing else.- no operator overloading- it *kind of* has exceptions (panic/recover), presumably because they realized not having any would be very annoying, but they're not very usable- whether reading from a channel is blocking also depends how many return values you use because of course
gollark: What, you mean no it doesn't have weird special cases everywhere?

References

  1. "Archaeology in the Forest: Mines and quarries of North Wales". The Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust. Retrieved 2008-02-29.
  2. "Rhyd y benwch Picnic Site". The Forestry Commission. Retrieved 2008-02-29.
  3. "Historic Landscape Characterisation, The Making of the Clywedog Valley Landscape". The Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust. Retrieved 2014-11-07.
  4. Spence, Barbara (March 2013). "The Forestry Commission in Wales 1919 - 2013" (PDF). Forestry Commission Wales. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-07-24. Retrieved 2014-11-07.
  5. "Welcome to Hafren Forest and the source of the River Severn" (PDF). The Forestry Commission. Retrieved 2014-11-07.
  6. "The Walk - factfile - The Wye Valley Walk". www.wyevalleywalk.org. Retrieved 2015-09-07.
  7. Evans, David (30 January 2013). "Why the WRC can't forget its past". Autosport.

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