return to my home page or one week later to see the lights being fitted, the big switch-on and carols round the tree
The Silchester Christmas Tree for 2006 is home grown and harvested! Its journey from forest plantation to the usual spot in front of the Calleva, however, was far from easy, involving two quads, two 4-wheel drives, a tipper truck and three hours hard work by a dedicated small team of volunteers.
Cutting the chosen tree down was the easy part.
Hauling to the road - quads could not shift it at all;
Range Rover got it moving and half way up the hill before the combination of weight and wet ground beat the road-tread tyres and the more chunky-tyred Land Rover had to be pressed into service.
Even this could not cope with the weight and wet ground of the hill and it was necessary to use a very long tow running round tree trunks to enable an angled tow from drier level ground.
At the road it was a case of serious effort to manhandle the tree onto Julian's truck....
...for the simple trip up the Little London Road
where the tipper mechanism provided the easiest erection since the tree tradition in Silchester started - much easier than the use of benches, scaffolding poles, ropes and large numbers of bodies in previous years!
NEW! one week later see the lights being fitted, the big switch-on and carols round the tree