How Jordan brings low impact forestry work and creative skills together

Meet Jordan, a skilled craftsman who lives and works on Dartmoor. When he’s not in his workshop creating woodland products, Jordan is out working in the woods with the Dartmoor Horse Logging team carrying out woodland management in the most low impact way.

We spoke to Jordan at Widecombe show, where he’s attended for the past four years as part of a collective of woodland/rural crafts people from the Westcountry, who come and bring a range of skills and products.

“I’m here tool handling, using wood that has mostly been extracted from local woodlands. I spend six months of the year as a contract feller, so I work at places like Fingle Woods for the Woodland Trust, and with the horse logging team. The rest of the year I’m in the workshop making handles, charcoal and woodland products. Making tool handles is my crafty thing I take most seriously – it’s all ash that I split up into billets, and from the billets I can make the handles and I find old vintage steel and bring it back to life.

“I live in Ashburton. I like being on the moor and doing something that makes me feel part of it, but I also like how I spend half my time outside doing something very physical - felling trees out of the woods and the valleys - and the other half in the workshop on the moors. So, I feel like I’m getting the best of both with that.”

Jordan works with the Dartmoor Horse loggers, who provide a low impact method of timber extraction and woodland management using horses. Based on the edge of Dartmoor, they have three horses who are French draft breeds – two Ardennes (William and Polly) and a Comtois (Beano). Using harness and other traditional equipment, such as a ‘swingle tree’, the team and their horses can access hard to reach woodland areas, and sensitive sites where wildlife and/or archaeology might be a concern, to carry out vital woodland management services.

Jordan describes his work with the Dartmoor Horse Loggers: “It’s often work with the Woodland Trust and sometimes private jobs. But when it’s Woodland Trust, most of it is low-impact work where they have a bit of bog, or maybe dormouse habitat where they need the timber extracted. There’s also temperate rainforest too, so the horses are perfect for that.

“Will (business owner) brings in the horses. I’ve trained with quite a few horse loggers – John, who’s here with me at Widecombe today, he was a horse logger as well. I trained with John for six or seven years before working with Will.

“Here on Dartmoor it makes an enormous amount of sense – it’s how they used to do it, and if you go into the woods and see the narrow tracks and the paths and you really look at the woodland, you realise that sometimes it’s the only way to do it. You can throw a bit of machinery at it, but you’ll be lucky if you get much out of it, so sometimes having these old ways is still massively relevant.”

Jordan sets his products out for display, and begins his work creating a new handle for an old axe in front a gathering crowd at Widecombe Fair. It's clear that Jordan is passionate about and proud of his work, both in the workshop and out in Dartmoor’s woodlands.

Article by Paula Legg

Communications Officer

January 2026