Page:TheTreesOfGreatBritainAndIreland vol01.djvu/186

158 My attention was called by Mr. R. Anderson of Cirencester to a very remarkable tree growing in a part of Earl Bathurst's woods about two miles from Cirencester, known as the Dear Bit. The tree, though it has lost some of its principal branches, is still, as our illustration shows (Plate 49), a very handsome one, and in size exceeds any other of the kind of which we have a record, either in this country or on the Continent. It is, as nearly as I can measure it, about 75 feet high by 11 feet in girth. It grows on dry shallow soil of the Oolite formation, and is close to a ride, which leads me to suppose that it was planted perhaps at the time when the park was laid out. It is near the north-east edge of the wood, and open to the southwest. I have never seen the flowers of this tree, which bears fruit only in favourable seasons near the ends of its uppermost branches, and as the birds are fond of it, and even in good years many of the seeds are immature, I have not until 1904 been able to procure any. A few of these have now produced small plants,

I have been unable to find any self-sown seedlings near this tree, and though there are one or two good-sized P. torminalis in another part of the park, probably planted, none of them approach it in size. As to the possible age of this tree, I can only say that the drive on the edge of which it grows has, as I am told by Mr. Anderson, certainly been in existence over 100 years, and the bank was covered with old beech, which were cut in 1892. The tree has become one-sided from the pressure of a beech which until then closed it in on the south-west side, where it is now open. As these beeches were 150 years old or more, the tree may be now from 150 to 200 years old, and it seems very probable that the person who designed this park had seen the tree at Fontainebleau, and introduced it when Oakley Park was planted by the ancestor of the present Earl Bathurst in Queen Anne's reign.