Ill 



A REPORT OX THE TREES OF HAREWOOD AND 

 PENGETHLEY. 



BY A COMMISSIONER FROM THE "VTOOLHOPE CLUB. 



[N.B. — T?ie circumference of the trees is always taken at 5 feet from the ground 

 when not otherwise specified ; and it will save repetition to remember that 

 the figures given, always refer to feet and inches.l 



The excellent photograph which forms the frontispiece to the present 

 volume of Transactions, represents the "Home Oak" at HarewooJ, with the 

 House in the distance. On the bole of the tree you will see the card of the 

 Club. It measures exactly one foot long by six inches deep, and fi'om the dark 

 line across its centre to the ground level is exactly five feet. With this scale 

 and a pair of fine compasses anyone can readily measure the tree with tolerable 

 accuracy. The bole at 5 feet — where the card is placed — measures 16 feet 10 

 inches in circumference. The height of the tree will be found to be 90 feet ; 

 and the spread of its branches, as seen from this aspect, nearly due north and 

 south, is 110 feet. The " Home Oak" is already a noble tree, and in its present 

 luxuriance and its future promise, is certainly one of the finest trees in this 

 county. Examine the photograph still more closely. Take a magnifying glass 

 of good defining power, and you will find in the figures beneath the tree, 

 exactly the people you would expect to be there. 



Before introducing you, however, into the leafy oasis of Harewood, it will 

 be better to make some general remarks on this district of the county. The 

 last thirty or forty years has made a difference in the landscape that at first sight 

 would scarcely be credited. If we may borrow a term from our geological 

 pages, a " denudation" of timber has taken place. Not alone have hedgerows 

 vanished under the modem fiat of enlarged enclosures, but whole masses of 

 coppice and plantation are gone ; of woody knolls, and deep glen-Uke " roughs," 

 which helped to give that alternation of tangled intricacy and open glade which 

 forms the most romantic expression of country scenery. The rich red soil 

 remains indeed, mellow and beautiful in its very bareness, laid out in wide and 

 open fields scored industriously with as straight a furrow line as may be seen in 

 many a better farmed district of England ; but the old dress that once formed 

 the predominant feature, the 



" Boundless contigtdty of shade " 

 is gone, and probablj' never to re-appear — never, at least, so long as population 

 thickens at home, and the forests of distant lands can float their tall burthens 

 to our shores at less cost than our own soil can afford to grow them, to the 

 displacement of the more prosaic but necessary acres of wheat, and barley, and 

 turnips. 



