Page:TheTreesOfGreatBritainAndIreland vol02B.djvu/217

Rh oak, about 50 feet high and 28 feet 9 inches in girth, and though all the veterans are long past their prime, there are still healthy growing oaks at Welbeck on the south side of the road to Norton, of which I measured one with a butt 32 feet high and 19 feet in girth, which Mr. Michie, the forester, considered would contain 500 feet in the butt alone. Such oaks have actually been cut and sold here in recent times; and I have a photograph, given me by Mr. G. Miles of Stamford, of a tree which he bought at auction for £40, and whose trunk measured 38 feet 6 inches long by 434 inches quarter-girth—equal to 511 feet 8 inches. It was so heavy that the weight on the wheels of the timber carriage broke through the road, and when brought to the station after much risk and trouble, the railway company refused to take it to Peterborough except on a special train by itself.

In Rockingham Park, Northants, the seat of the Rev. Wentworth Watson, there are a number of wonderful oaks, many of which are brown, and I had the opportunity, through the kindness of Mr. C. Richardson of Stamford, of seeing several of these felled in September 1903. He told me that, in the whole course of his long experience, he had never seen so many fine brown oaks together as these. The park lies high, on land which looks like oolitic limestone, the rock in some places coming near the surface; but where these oaks grow there is a good depth of loamy soil. Some of the trees which I saw lying were more or less hollow, and required no saw to bring them down. I was anxious to photograph one in the act of falling, and as the fellers were at work on one of the best, I asked them to let me know how long it would take; the roots only being then cut all round the tree. | expected that some hours would be required, but before the camera was fixed to take the tree as it stood, they suddenly called out, "stand clear," and down it came.

Plate 96 shows what the roots of these brown oaks are usually like, but if there is a foot or two of sound wood in the lower part, and the brown colour extends a good way up the trunk, they are still very valuable. I asked the fellers if they could tell a brown oak standing without boring it, and they said they could make a good guess at the colour, though they could not be sure. Probably long experience in a district where brown oak seems to be commoner than elsewhere, is the only guide, if there is one; but stories are told of men going in the night to bore such trees with an auger before trying to buy them, in the hopes of getting a bargain. From a statement sent me by Mr. Richardson, it appears that twenty-six of these trees were sold for £1100, five of them for 4100 each, and contained about 8030 feet, all measured over bark, and nothing allowed for defects.

The best of this lot were eventually sold to Messrs. J.T. Williams of New York, and afterwards bought by the Pullman Company at a very high price. Mr. Richard Dean, of that Company, informs me that he considered the wood superior to any that they had previously used, and was good enough to send me some samples of the veneer made from them, which has been used in decorating their palace railway cars. The largest of these specimens measures 6 feet 1 inch by 2 feet 8 inches without a flaw, and is throughout of a uniform chestnut-brown colour, mottled with silvery patches, formed by the medullary rays, showing that it has been cut from a quartered plank.