R: It all started really when the Cwmbran Community Council had a letter from a Mr Larkin who owned the long term lease of the wood above Upper Cwmbran that lies adjacent to the old reservoir that used to provide water to the town. Mr Larkin was aware that local people often walked the area for weekend recreation, but the area was also use by scrambler bikes and had suffered with people lighting fires. He was looking to see if there was interest in local people helping to manage the wood.

Q: Is it right that the owner lived some way from here?

R: Yes, but he visited on a fairly regular basis and had a local agent here who helped manage the wood, Mr David Parsons. It was actually David Parsons who came to talk to the Community Council about the wood and how the local community might get involved.

Q: So David Parsons was the local contact?

R: Yes, David had many years working for the Forestry Commission in the local area, and has also had a longstanding involvement with the Gwent Wildlife Trust, latterly as Chair. He was well known in the local environment field and very interested in seeing the wood become more available for the community.

Q: So what happened next?

R: Well the Community Council was very interested to hear what David Parsons had to say, and it touched a chord, because a number of children at the local primary school in Upper Cwmbran, the appropriately named Woodlands School, had visited the wood with their teacher and had actually written letters about it to the Community Council. One of the local community councillors, Evelyn Winfield, was a governor at Woodlands school and so knew that there was local interest.

Q: How did the interest develop from there?

R: A meeting was called at the local Scout Group hut in Upper Cwmbran, and people with an interest were invited to come along. From that meeting a few people indicated an interest in forming a local Trust group to help manage the wood. That was some two years ago, and that small group looked to register themselves as a Trust with the help of Torfaen Voluntary Alliance.

Q: So who was involved?

R: Quite a few people expressed interest – and one of the things we really want to do is invite people to become members or Friends of the Wood – but a small number indicated that they were willing to be Trustees – Chris Harris, Mark Crew, David Williams, Roger Stevenson, Rees Preston and Roy Dixon. They are all local members of the community, and short pen-portraits appear on the website

Q: So how did you get the money to go ahead?

R: We looked around to see what sort of grant support might be available to support local woodlands and came across Cydcoed, the funding arm of the Forestry Commission. They had a very helpful lady, Barbara Angelzarke, who had helped one of our group take forward a woodland project for scouts in a neighbouring Borough. We went through the grant application process last year in 2004, then got a bit of a surprise…

Q: What sort of surprise?

R: Well the lease owner, Mr Larkin, had seen visits to the wood, a number of meetings, but things seemed to be moving quite slowly. In June 2004 then he wrote to the group, offering to sell the leasehold to the Trust if they could undertake to buy it by the end of 2004, at a price of only £20,000, The Wood covers an area of approximately 100 acres, so we realised that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to ensure that the Wood come into community ownership for the next 900 years!

It gave us an incentive to work closely with Cydcoed, with the local Community Council and the Borough Council to move forward – and a critical element was getting letters of support from a wide range of community groups and schools. We would like to thank all of them for their support – and we will be inviting them to join us as we start to take forward projects in the Wood. We slightly overshot the target as purchase eventually took place in January – but close enough!

Q: And the future?

R: A lot of hard work! Seriously we know that it has been the support of very many people and organisations that have got us this far, and we look forward to working with schools, community groups and individuals to enhance their enjoyment of a splendid local natural beauty spot in a way that means the wood is well looked after for generations to come.