THE WOODS OF SOMERSET. 217 
old warrens, quarries and other waste places on the sandstones, 
copses of oak, birch and sallow spring up quite spontaneously. 
There is not a natural beech wood of even moderate dimensions 
to be found in the district. Isolated trees and small clumps of 
beech occur here and there, and small belts and plantations are 
not uncommon. 
The vegetation of the limestones is much more varied in 
character than that of the other rocks and soils of the district. 
The woods of the limestones are dominated by the common ash. 
Natural copses of ash and ash-associates are numerous, the 
larger of which possess many features in common with the ash 
woods. The ash woods occur on the slopes of limestone hills. 
Reference to the vegetation map which accompanies the paper 
will show how they fringe the summit cultivation on the Mendip 
Hills. Ash woods are found on the Carboniferous Limestone, 
on the Dolomitic Conglomerate, and on the Oolitic lime- 
stones around Bath. Some of the ash woods are partially a 
result of modern forestry; yet many appear to be truly primitive, 
and seem to be the scattered remnants of the historic forest of 
Mendip. ‘The soil of the ash woods is a red marl, sometimes 
very shallow, stony and dry, and in such situations the ash 
occurs to the exclusion of every other arboreal species. Great 
stretches of dog’s mercury and wood garlic are characteristic of 
the ground vegetation of the ash woods: bluebells and bracken 
are scarce; and olcus mollis is quite unknown. The ash wood 
had been recognised, in a previous botanical survey of Yorkshire 
by Smith and Rankin, as a type of the vegetation of the Carboni- 
ferous Limestone of Yorkshire; and the occurrence of pure 
ash woods is also recorded on the same geological formation 
in Derbyshire. It would seem, therefore, that the ash wood is 
characteristic of limestone districts. 
Oak-hazel woods are characteristic of the deep marls and 
clays, such as the New Red (Keuper) Marl, the Lias, the 
Bradford Clay, the Fuller’s Earth and the Oxford Clay. The 
oak is the dominant tree, but in these woods it is not planted so 
thickly as in the oak woods of the sandstones. Shrubs, usually 
hazel, are planted among the oak standards, and the hazel- 
coppice is exploited. The tendency to replace hazel-coppice by 
high-forest is not observable in Somerset. Many of the oak- 
hazel woods are about a century and a half old; but others are 
more ancient, and possess many of the characteristics of 
VOL, XX. PART II. P 
