One man and his horse

WITH a clinking of chains, the rustling of vegetation and the scraping of hauled timber, they emerge from the wood: a man and his horse evoking memories of an age which many thought had long gone.

But Mark Turnbull and his horse Sally are no ordinary working partnership because, in an age of be-suited businesspeople and sharply dressed PAs, they are award-winners, not once but two years running.

Mark, who set up his logging business in south Durham just three years ago, removing felled timber from areas with difficult access, is a man with a passion for the age-old working partnership between man and horse.

That passion was recognised earlier this year in a glittering ceremony at the Riverside Stadium in Middlesbrough, when he was honoured in the Tees Valley Best New Business Awards 2003, which reward businesses which have been up and running for three years or less. For the second year running, Mark won the Environmental Award.

Mark recalls: "There were some big businesses in for the award. One had six people there and they all had PAs - and then there was me, a chap who worked with his horse."

But the world of big business is not his natural environment. That has always been the land. After leaving school, Mark, now 39, began his working life in horticulture and started his own landscape business.

"But," he says, "Everyone with a wheelbarrow and a hoe thinks they are a gardener and making a living was hard work. I had always been around horses and I was aware of the work which horse loggers did so I decided to give it a try."

The result was the formation three years ago of Mark Turnbull Horse Logging and Forestry Services, initially based in the Tees Valley, but now working from a farm in Mainsforth Village, near Ferryhill. Importing specially designed bogies from Scandinavia to help pull the logs, he set about helping to revive a great countryside tradition.

In the earlier decades of the 20th century, the horse was still king but, as intensive farming methods took over, machinery replaced the beast of burden.

Today, the onus seems to be swinging back a little. Mark says: "When people say to me 'what can you do?", I answer that it is what I will not do. I will not create ruts; I will not create big roads to get the machines in; I will not make a lot of noise. Some sites where we work had machines used on them 15 years ago and you can still see the ruts today.

'If you take a tractor into a wood you need to create a road for it. That is not the case with a horse. They can work in some really tight areas, bringing the logs out of woods where machines simply cannot operate.

"Sixty or 70 years ago, the horse was still the major mover in this country and, although machines took over, horse loggers never went away. There are people who have been locked away in the same piece of forest for years. Now horse loggers are enjoying a resurgence. Everybody is thinking green, they are thinking about recycling, they are looking at things from a green aspect, and the amount of work is increasing."

The horse - Mark has four of them - really comes into its own in areas such as Sites of Special Scientific Interest, where rare habitats need to be protected. Mark and his horses work all over the region on delicate sites, ranging from wooded hillsides to ponds and meadows.

His main horse is Sally, a 14-year-old Dales cross, with a varied working career. During her life she has ploughed fields, pulled a barge and taken a caravan around Europe.

Mark acquired her two years ago and she helps with logging and bracken bashing - where the bracken is flattened and bruised rather than cut off cleanly. A traditional practice, bashing, according to Mark, prevents the plant's trademark rapid regeneration and also avoids the need for potentially damaging herbicides.

He says: "We can work just about anywhere. Horses can go up steep hills or on boggy land. We worked in Askham Bog near York and they had tried a machine but it sank into the bog, as did the quad bikes. But the horse stepped from stump to stump of firm ground.

"And when we worked in Nidderdale, in the Yorkshire Dales, there were rocks all over and Sally clambered over them and jumped from one side of small ravines to others. Machines cannot do that."

Mark is a member of the national Forestry Contractors Association and of its sub-group the British Horse Loggers, which has 46 members, a very small number in the North. He reckons that of those 46, only a dozen or so make a full-time living from the industry.

Mark is one of them and has worked, on occasion, with other loggers in the region. It's a small world and they all know of each other.

Although there is a commercial imperative - "I have a wife and four children to feed" - there is also a sense of the evangelist in Mark's approach.

Seeing him work with Sally, keeping her exuberance in check with commands as they haul logs from a wood just outside Mainsforth, it is obvious that this is a labour of love.

He freely admits it: "I just have to keep on banging the drum about what you are doing. You have to believe in what you can do then be prepared to go out and prove that it works.

"I have always been around horses. They are my life. I even take them on holiday: we go to Yarm Fair and Appleby Fair.

"And if, 20 years from now, all the forests dry up, you will probably find me and a horse up there in space, pulling the Space Shuttle!"