The weather had perked up a bit by mid week so I went for a walk. Parking the car in Pop’s wood I set off on a very muddy bridle path running alongside the base of an adjoining piece of woodland. The woodland had been previously managed and appeared to have a reasonable density of hornbeam and hazel stools but they hadn’t been coppiced for a significant period.
Along the edge of the woodland and immediately at the side of the bridle path was a line of old oak trees. These oaks were just over three in diameter at breast height. A hug is the distance between an adults outstretched arms from finger tip to finger tip and is on average 5 feet (1.5m). So wrapping yourself around a tree is a good way of either getting arrested or determining the tree’s diameter. That in turn will give an indication of its age. The Woodland Trust has a ready-reckoner for estimating the age of a tree in their oak age estimator.
These trees had a diameter of just over 17′ so would come out as being 300+ years old.
As can be seen by the shape of the trees they have been pollarded in their past.
Pollarding was preferred over coppicing in wood-pastures and other grazed areas, because animals would browse the regrowth from coppice stools but were unable to reach the regrowth on the top of a pollarded tree. Historically, the right to pollard or “lop” was often granted to local people for fuel on common land.
An incidental beneficial effect of pollarding in woodland is the encouragement of underbrush growth due to increased levels of light reaching the woodland floor. This can increase species diversity. However, in woodland where pollarding was once common but has now ceased, the opposite effect occurs, as the side and top shoots develop into trunk-sized branches. The thick growth of the pollarded trees severely restricts the light that reaches the woodland floor.
In the examples above, some of the pollarded branches have snapped off and taken with them a significant section of the original tree stem. In both cases this has created huge cavities that are large enough to walk into and provide great hiding places.
I wonder if these trees will continue to survive, the growth in the “new” top stems is so heavy and so out of proportion to the base that they look vulnerable particularly to strong winds.
However in the meanwhile they are great reminders of an ancient craft and are things of beauty in their own right.
More next time……………….
Tim Burr 