AS you make your way into Dalby Forest, at Haygate you will see Ray Lonsdale's fabricated steel sculpture, Pull Don't Push, a memorial to the wartime labours of the Lumberjills, commissioned by the Forestry Commission in 2013.

More than 9,000 women as young as 17 were recruited to the Women’s Timber Corps in England, set up by the Ministry of Supply (Home Grown Timber Department) in 1942 as part of the Women's Land Army, with its own identity, uniform and green beret, only to vanish from recognition as if walking deep into the woods, once the war was won.

Common Ground Theatre playwright Hannah Davies would not have been alone in not being aware of the Lumberjills, when she first saw Lonsdale's sculpture on a site visit. Not until the past few years has the WTC's war effort been recognised in Remembrance Day ceremonies.

Davies's 70-minute play will play its part in bringing the Lumberjills to greater attention, and how pleasing it is to learn that Lumberjills from Dalby Forest's past have been among the audiences to attend performances.

Production designer Jessica Watson's set of a 1940s' military campsite with canvas awnings, log seating and wood shavings at the end of Dalby Forest’s Ellerburn Trail is a 20 to 30-minute walk from the visitor centre, a chance to wonder at the beauty and majesty of Yorkshire's biggest woodland as part of your "outdoor theatre experience".

Davies's last site-specific piece, the Coxwold audio-walk Within This Landscape, matched story to setting in such a moving way in August 2014. Once more she brings intimacy to a vast canvas as she tells the stories of three Lumberjills, drawn together from differing backgrounds to carry out the arduous tasks of felling, snedding, loading lorries and trains and sawmilling timber.

In Tom Cornford's a cappella-singing, multi role-playing cast, Jannah Warlow's acquisitions officer Mary, from a North Riding farm, has a young husband serving overseas. Ashleigh Cordery's factory lass Ada comes from a working-class Sheffield family that demands she sends money home. Amie Burns Walker's pucker southerner Connie is doing something useful at the insistence of her mother and scornful father.

Davies's story takes the Lumberjills from training camp to forest graft, encounters with Italian POWs, blossoming first love, a workplace accident and beyond the forest to the horrors of war. Yet such is her skill at storytelling, memorable imagery and dialogue that it all feels as natural as wood, rather than a tick list, while she rallies to the cause of these "unspoken heroes" with unbridled admiration and passion.

The Lumberjills disappear into the woods at the play's close, but rightly re-emerge to a burst of applause: applause intended as much for the women of the past as the cast. "There's an echo in the forest," they sing, an echo that will continue to tell of the Lumberjills' deeds.

Common Ground Theatre presents The Lumberjills, Dalby Forest, near Pickering, tonight to Sunday, at 2pm and 6pm; suitable for age seven upwards. Allow half an hour to walk to the performance site at the end of the Ellerburn Trail, Dalby Forest. Box office: cgtheatre.co.uk