Matthew Barber, 66, decided to do something a little different when he received his pension lump sum four years ago.

In April 2022, the doctor, who now practises as a locum GP, spent £89,000 buying five and a half acres of woodland in Somerset.

“I was a partner at a GP practice, and I received a lump sum as part of my pension. I’d done a bit of tree planting in the past and I Googled ‘tree planting’,” he says.

He ended up buying via a website called Woodlands.co.uk, which came up in his search and charged roughly £16,000 an acre.

While the price was higher than if he bought direct, Matthew found the legal process of purchasing the land ran very smoothly.

“The easiest part was buying it and the conveyancing. It’s much easier than when you buy a house,” he says.

The woodland is in Midsomer Norton, Somerset, 20km from where Matthew lives in Bristol, so he can even cycle there.

“It’s got a field shelter, a 3-sided shed with one open side for animals to shelter under. If you have a shelter that you can lock up, people think there is something worth nicking in there,” he adds.

While Matthew was keen to buy the woodland, he didn’t initially know how he would use it.

“I thought it is a safe investment,” he says. “My thinking is that no one can damage it or steal it, there is very little that can happen to it, so the risk was minimal,” he said.

But soon after he’d made the purchase, he was contacted by the Forest of Avon Trust.

“They sent the tree officer round, and he gave me a 100 per cent grant to plant 3,000 trees,” says Matthew.

“I don’t know if I caught them at the end of the financial year, when they had a lot of money to spend, but DEFRA paid me £27,000 and included in that was getting a private company to do the planting. I did [the planting] for the enjoyment of it, but they also had people come and do it too.”

The scheme saw broadleaf trees such as oak, birch, hazel and hawthorn introduced in order to increase biodiversity, flood prevention and maintain the UK’s tree cover.

It’s been three years and many of the trees are now 2.5 metres tall. Matthew has installed owl boxes and barn owls are using them, and there are also trail cameras which have recorded foxes, badgers and birds of prey.

“We camp here in the summer as there is a patch of mown grass in the middle of the field. We also do hedge-laying and there is always maintenance, for example the tree stakes need to be secured,” he says.

While maintaining the trees does involve some work, the 66-year-old would recommend buying woodland to others. “[The flexibility] is one of the pleasures of it. If you don’t want to do anything, you don’t have to do much. It will rewild itself and you can let it naturally rewild,” he says.

As buying the woodland was a bit of an unusual investment, Matthew has put the rest of his pension lump sum into ISAs and premium bonds.

“I was very boring [with the remainder] and just made it part of my normal finances,” he says. Based on what he has seen advertised, Matthew estimates the value of the land has increased by 10 per cent.

“I knew I would be having it for a long time and I’m not planning to sell it for 10 or 15 years,” he says. “As a long-term investment, it’s safe. If I wanted to sell next year, I’d be less certain.”

He also wants to ensure that the trees have time to mature so that the land can’t be used for anything else when he does sell: “Just pottering around with a coffee in the shelter we built, it’s my escape from city life.”