We spent a few years looking for a suitable plot of land before eventually buying 5 acres near where we live in the Shropshire Hills National Landscape. Initially we focussed our search on an established woodland but these all ended up being outside of our budget. johnclegg.co.uk and tustins.co.uk were the main websites we used to keep an eye out for woodlands coming on to the market. We had a look at a couple of plots via woodlands.co.uk but we didn’t think this option suited us for a couple of reasons. Their business model is based around breaking larger woodlands into smaller parcels and selling them separately. Parcelling and fencing land into smaller plots reduces the movement of wildlife and often there is the addition of a parking space, path and glade in every parcel which causes a net reduction in tree coverage which goes against what we are trying to achieve.
We spent some enjoyable weekends exploring existing woodlands around where we lived. We looked for overgrown unmanaged areas and then used the Land Registry website to find out who owned it so we could write to them and ask if they had considered selling. None of those avenues came to fruition but we did make some contacts with friendly land owners in our locality.
The route that worked for us in the end was keeping an eye on the local land auction websites for grazing land and fields that we could then plant as a future woodland.
Struan's Wood 