CHANCES are the Christmas trees that customers buy from Forestry Commission sites in the North-East this year have travelled hundreds of miles before reaching their destination.

And most of them will not even have been grown by the Forestry Commission.

Thousands of the trees being sold at commission forests at Kielder in Northumberland, Chopwell, near Gateshead, and Hamsterley in County Durham, have been grown by private contractors - some of them as far away as the Isle of Skye in North- West Scotland.

The commission grows very few trees for the Christmas market in the North-East, despite managing 120,000 acres mainly of spruce at Kielder, 500 acres of spruce and pine at Hamsterley, and 1,000 acres mainly of spruce at Chopwell.

The bulk of the trees sold at the commission's two main outlets - at Chopwell Woods and Hamsterley Forest - come from plantations in Northumberland, owned by Bellingham-based Christmas tree grower Dave Ridley. Others, like Lodgepole pines, have made the long journey to the North-East from the Isle of Skye and Caithness, in Scotland.

From his plantations, covering 300 acres in the county, Mr Ridley has cut 15,000 Christmas trees for the UK markets this year, supplying the commission "shop" at Chopwell.

Mr Ridley, who works with the Friends of Chopwell Woods, also buys in trees from Ireland and southern Scotland.

"Growing Christmas trees today is a very specialist business," he said.

"The public is demanding much more sophisticated trees, like needle-fast firs, and we have to meet that demand."

He said that most forests in the UK had "ungrowable conditions" for sophisticated Christmas trees like the noble and lodgepole pines.

Mr Ridley said his firm was delivering freshly-cut trees to the Forestry Commission on three or four days a week - he stressed there were no transport delays. But other trees, notably from northern Scotland, are making long journeys before being sold. One load of 200 lodgepole pines from the Isle of Skye, ordered by Forest Enterprise HQ in Staffordshire, which handles Christmas tree sales throughout Britain, were transported hundreds of miles to Hamsterley Forest.

Graham Gill, the commission's regional forest manager, admitted there may now be a strong case for the commission to develop its own Christmas tree growing programme.

"At present, very few are being grown in our forests. It is a very specialist business."

Mr Gill said spare land under power lines could be a good place to grow the trees.

The bulk of the trees cut down by the commission, he said, went to sawmills for use in building and chipboard manufacture