Clearing the ground is the easy half
Land that has stood for a few years doesn’t come back with a mow. Bramble, blackthorn and self-seeded ash take the corners first, then the fence lines, then the field. Cutting it down is straightforward enough — the awkward part is the heap of brash left behind, which is too big to burn casually, too bulky to trailer out, and too green to be much use to anyone.
Chipping deals with that on site. Everything that comes off goes through the chipper where it falls, and instead of a fortnight of trailer runs you’re left with a few cubic metres of clean woodchip. That either stays — spread on gateways and muddy tracks, mulched round trees, or stacked to rot down — or goes away with the rest of the tidy-up. Either way the field is usable again at the end of the job rather than at the end of the clear-up.
A chipper that gets to the work
I run a Timberwolf TW 280FTR: a tracked, self-propelled chipper with a 10 × 8 inch mouth, a 57 hp Kubota engine and a throughput of around seven tonnes an hour. The tracks are the point of it. A towed chipper has to sit on hard standing while somebody drags brash a hundred yards down to it; this one walks up the field, across soft ground and through ordinary gateways, and works alongside the pile. On horse paddocks, smallholdings and the tight corners I mostly work in, that’s the difference between a job that’s worth doing and one that isn’t.
Anything bigger than the chipper will take gets rung down with the saw first — cordwood stacked for your log pile if you want it, chipped if you don’t.
Typical clearance jobs
- Overgrown paddocks and fields coming back into use after a few years standing
- Bramble, blackthorn, gorse and scrub along fence lines and boundaries
- Self-seeded ash, sycamore and willow taking over grazing
- Storm-fallen and dead timber, and the brash left behind after tree work
- Clearing a line before new fencing goes in, or a whole site before reseeding
- Arb arisings and garden clearance too big for a green bin
Timing, and the nesting-season rule
Scrub clearance follows the same constraint as hedge work: between March and August hedges and scrub are full of nesting birds, and it’s an offence to damage an active nest. That puts the bulk of clearance work between September and February — which suits the job anyway, because with the foliage down you can see what you’re actually cutting and the ground is usually firmer underfoot.
Winter also settles the disposal question. Burning is still an option on farmland, but it wants an Environment Agency exemption, a dry day and somebody standing over it until it’s out. Chipping needs none of that, and doesn’t leave a scorched circle in the middle of a paddock.
What it costs
Clearance is quoted per job rather than per hour or per acre, because the price depends on what’s actually in there. Two acres of light bramble is a very different day to half an acre of twenty-year-old blackthorn with old fencing wire buried through it. A few photos and a rough idea of the area are usually enough for a price the same day; if it’s a big or an awkward one, I’ll come and look first.
Related work
Ditches, culverts and drainage outfalls are a separate job — that’s land & ditch clearance. If what you’ve got is heavy grass and light scrub rather than woody growth, flailing is usually quicker and cheaper, and boundary hedges are covered under hedge cutting.
