Page:TheTreesOfGreatBritainAndIreland vol02B.djvu/190

314 ancient oak near by, called the Gibbet Oak, on which tradition says that criminals were formerly hung in chains.

Of the difficulty and risk of removing some of these immense trees when steam traction engines were not in use by timber merchants, Mr. Openshaw gave me an excellent instance which he actually saw himself. A very large oak was felled in a field near Woofferton and sold to a naval timber buyer at Exeter. It was so long and heavy that two of the largest timber carriages were fastened together, and 28 horses brought to get it away. In rolling it up on to the carriage one of the chains got round a horse's leg, but they dared not stop to clear it, and the horse was killed. Mr. Openshaw saw the carriage coming down the road with the log on it, and, believing that it could not pass through the turnpike gate, warned the woman who kept it, to get out of the house, as if the log touched it the house would certainly come down. The man in charge of the team, however, ran on in front and steered the leaders so accurately through the gate that, with an inch to spare, it got past in safety.

It seems probable that many of the great oaks in England which are now decayed, owe their lives to the cost and risk of converting and removing them in the days when there were no railways, and good roads were scarce or absent.

The Nunupton Oak.—The remains of a very large fallen oak, not, however, so big as the one at Croft Castle, is described in the Transactions of the Woolhope Naturalists' Field Club, 1870, p. 307. It had long been hollow, and was large enough to contain forty-two sheep at once. It was alive and covered with leaves up till about 1851, when it was set on fire by accident, and was felled soon afterwards, with what object I do not know. In 1870 it was 60 feet long and 26 feet 8 inches in girth, and was still lying in much the same condition when I visited it in 1904.

According to the late Mr. Edwin Lees, whose knowledge of the botany of Worcestershire was very accurate, and whose sketches of old trees, some of which I have, through the kindness of his widow, been allowed to copy, the finest old oak in the county known to him in 1867 stood in a field near the Severn, below Holt, and was known as the Boar Stag Oak. It measured about 34 feet in girth at 3 feet from the base, and might be roughly calculated at 800 years old.

Other remarkable oaks in Worcestershire were described and figured by W. G. Smith, in the Gardeners Chronicle, 1873, p. 1497. They grew in the Lug Meadows, near Moreton, and were known as Adam and Eve. When the Shrewsbury and Hereford Railway was made, Eve, which measured 25 feet in girth, and was quite hollow, was converted by the navvies into a residence: the top was thatched in, a brick fireplace built, and a door fitted, and for months after the line was opened this tree was the only residence of the stationmaster, and was afterwards converted into a lamp-room and so used for fourteen years.

The finest oaks that I know of in Somersetshire are at Nettlecombe Court, the seat of Sir Walter Trevelyan, Bart. When staying at Dunster Castle, in March 1904, Mr. Luttrell was good enough to give me an opportunity of seeing them. He told me that at a previous time, which, from the information received from the agents for the property, I gather to have been about 1847, but Mr. Luttrell thinks it was