Living in a caravan with one small child and another on the way, it was time to start building that house!
We had been here for a winter now, turning up the previous summer with a very second-hand static caravan which we rolled off the track and into the long grass where it immediately bogged and remained in that same spot for the next five years.
And what a spot… Inzievar Woods.
Inzievar Woods had been part of the Inzievar Estate – a large house with stables, servants’ quarters, and outbuildings, now all sub-divided and sold as flats and dwellings.
Our bit of woodland was the last chunk to be sold, but only after much of it had been cleared and turned into an open-cast coal mine.
That was in the 1980s. This was now 1995, and the huge hole had only recently been filled back in and “smoothed” over.
And this is where we landed – with a year-old baby and a decrepit caravan.
A hardwood sawmill was perhaps the furthest things from our mind at this point.
I was a farmer’s son from Orkney where trees were a rarity, and Maggie, a physicist, now worked in the voluntary sector in Kirkcaldy.
Close to our caravan were a few dying Oak trees that needed felled. I assumed we could sell these to help raise some house building funds, but no one was interested. Instead, we followed Plan B: cutting up the logs so that we could use them in the build.
So, we got in touch with local mobile sawmiller, Frank Gamwell, who turned up with his mobile saw and we cut these trunks in to boards. We set the timber to drying, then dreamed of the beautiful flooring and finishings we might create in our home from these stunning bits of wood.
Wrong once again… Once it became known we had seasoned oak boards from Scottish Oak trees, a trickle of wood enthusiasts and furniture makers had soon made off with the lot! The house’s foundations were barely laid before it had all sold.
But now the seed was sown. A hardwood sawmill had become our destiny!
But it was to be no normal sawmill, and no normal model for a homegrown enterprise.
Maggie was a true socialist who didn’t want to be a business owner. We had recently returned from a year of voluntary work for an aid organisation in El Salvador where we had been involved in the relocation of returning refugees setting up new communities across the country.
They operated a unique model: a “mother charity” would own and support a range of small businesses that allowed the communities to function and develop.
Impressed by this, and by how well it worked, Maggie thought this same model could work in Scotland too, and so Dynamic Woods – the “mother charity”, and Scottish Wood – its baby – was born.
It still raises eyebrows – “a charity sawmill?!” – but it’s been fun. The organisation has been involved in all sorts of areas and activities that a small business model would not normally have been able to entertain.
We have used profits and resources from the sawmill to support such a range of dreams and projects, from the educational and the environmental through to social and even maritime related projects.
And the sawmill, as a stand-alone business, has been more successful that we ever imagined.
Sadly, Maggie is no longer with us. She passed away in 2018, but her vision remains, and we go on doing what we always have done but now with Joanne, Maggie’s daughter, with a learning hand on the helm and a steady course into whatever the future holds.
