296 The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland 



Distribution of the Common Oak 



Owing to the general opinion of English botanists that there is only one 

 indigenous species of oak, with two inconstant varieties, there are few accurate 

 records of the distribution of the two species, and in the majority of cases it is 

 impossible to say whether the specimens in our great herbaria are from wild or 

 cultivated trees. Moreover, owing to the great changes caused by the spread of 

 cultivation and the cutting down of most of the original woodland, the correct 

 distribution of the two species can scarcely be made out. It is probable, however, 

 that in ancient times the pedunculate oak occupied the alluvial lands and the better 

 soils, now almost entirely devoted to agriculture and pasture. Hedgerow trees are 

 invariably of this species. The sessile oak occupied the hilly land and the poorer 

 soils ; and in existing oak-woods occurring in such situations, which have never been 

 touched by the plough, it is always the species met with, as in the Wyre Forest, the 

 Forest of Dean, in the district about Burnham Beeches, in Lord Cowper's woods 

 near Welwyn, Herts, which are on high-lying poor gravel soil, etc. In Scotland, 

 judging from a specimen at Kew, the famous Birnam wood consisted of Quercus 

 sessiliflora} In Ireland, the ancient wood of Shillelagh, in Wicklow, of which a 

 remnant still exists, was the same species. The Cratloe wood near Limerick is of 

 pure sessile oak ; and it is the only species in the wilder parts of Kerry. All the 

 specimens of Q. pedunculata which I have received from Ireland, are from planted 

 trees. 



In England the oak ascends to 1200 feet in Yorkshire. In an interesting paper 

 by H. B. Watt on the "Altitude of Forest Trees in the Cairngorm Mountains"* in 

 Scotland, 700 to 800 feet is given as the highest level at which the oak was 

 observed ; but Mr. Watt says, in a MS. note, that he found in July 1903 a small oak 

 at Corriemulzie at an elevation of 1 200 feet. The same author gives many interesting 

 particulars of the oak in Scotland, in a paper published in the Annals of the Ander- 

 sonian Naturalists' Society, ii. 89 (1900). In Ireland the oak ascends in Derry to 

 1480 feet. There are remains of virgin forest in Donegal, on Sir Arthur Wallace's 

 property near Lough Esk ; and a very large oak wood, which is of great antiquity, 

 occurs at Clonbrock, the seat of Lord Clonbrock, in Co. Galway, on the limestone 

 formation. There are smaller woods in many of the mountain glens, and Mr. Welch 

 of Belfast says that where these primitive bits of forest have never been touched by 

 tillage, peculiar and local forms of land-shells occur, and the Clonbrock oak forest 

 contains rare plants, moths, etc., unknown elsewhere. The oak was in early times 

 much more widely spread ; it has been found, e.g., in a peat moss in the Orkneys. 

 Mr, T. T. Armistead ' found a young oak growing in a sheltered ravine on the coast 



Mr. Steuart Fothringham of Murthly confirms this by leaves from the large oak behind the Biroam Hotel at Dunkeld, 

 which Hunter says is one of the few survivors of the Great Birnam Wood. 



* Cairngorm Clul' Journal, iv. Ill (1903). 

 ^ Zoologist, 1 89 1, p. 19. 



