Felling leaning Sycamore with a Tirfor winch and chainsaw

Yesterday we did one of our last couple of jobs in the wood this winter. A year ago we'd had to leave some heavily leaning trees, but now we have a decent Tirfor winch, we decided to finish them off. Here's the trees:

We used the winch and a steel rope to do the pulling, but also had another rope attached to help control the tree as it fell. Here's a video of the first one coming down, including our neighbour Francis helping out with his pole saw:

The other ones didn't come down quite so neatly, heading off sideways, but thanks to the rope that was attached in addition to the winch cable there was no damage done. This is one of the problems with Sycamore - the hinge is extremely weak and separates when the tree moves just a small amount. Here's the view afterwards:

There's one more job to be done during January - the two large Sycamore on the edge, further down the hill. Our friend Tim will be felling them for us, and we'll do the rest of the work once they're down.

Mike