3i8 The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland 



remainder, including the bark, estimated at ;^i4 per ton. Near it is a tree of great 

 height, leaning at an angle of about one in four to one side, though quite firm in the 

 ground ; and it seemed to me that all the trees in this grove owed their great height 

 and clean stems to their having been drawn up by beech trees, many of which are 

 now dead or dying. Close to the Park Lodge are three very curious and picturesque 

 old trees, one of which is called the Venison Oak, because King John is supposed 

 to have dined under it ; another, which we christened the Beer-barrel, is an immense 

 burry shell lo or 12 feet high and 28 feet round, with hardly any branches ; a third 

 we called Gouty Toes, because of a huge swollen root, like a gouty foot, on one 

 side of it. 



Dr. Plot, in his Natural History of Staffordshire, p. 213, after speaking of 

 different species of trees growing together, among which were an oak and an ash 

 near Chartley, hollies and oaks at Bagot's Park, and an oak and thorn at Drayton 

 Basset, goes on to speak of trees "that grow so conjoynd that they seem 

 (after the manner of some sort of animals) to prey upon one another," and 

 says : " But the most signal example of this kind is the large fair birch, about 

 the bigness of one's thigh, that grows on the bole of an oak in the lane leading 

 south from Adbaston Church, which has sent down its roots in six branches 

 perpendicularly through the whole length of its trunk and fastened them in the 

 ground, which might be seen in a hole cut in the bottom of the oak ; having eaten 

 out the bowells of the old tree (as all the rest will doe) that first gave it life and then 

 support. All which are occasioned, no doubt, by the seeds of those trees dropt by 

 birds in the mould on the boles of the others that lyes commonly there, and is made 

 of the annual rottings of their own leaves." 



He goes on to speak of another great oak, " lying near the Lodge house in Ellen 

 Hall Park, of so vast a bulk that my man upon a horse of 15 hands high, standing on 

 one side of it, and I also on horseback on the other could see no part of each other " ; 

 and also of an oak that " was felled about twenty years since in Wrottesley Park which, 

 as the worthy Sir Walter Wrottesley (a man far from vanity of imposition) seriously 

 told me, was 15 yards in girth." " How much less in bigness and number of tuns 

 the oak might be that grew in the New Park at Dudley, and made the table now 

 lying in the old hall at Dudley Castle, is not remembered, but certainly it must be 

 a tree of prodigious height and magnitude out of which a table all of one plank 

 could be cut, 25 yards 3 inches long and wanting but 2 inches of a yard in breadth 

 for the whole length, from which they were forced (it being so much too long for 

 the hall at Dudley) to cut off 7 yards 9 inches, which is the table in the hall at 

 Corbins Hall hard by, the ancient seat of the Corbins." 



In the park at Merevale Hall, Warwickshire, the seat of W. F. S. Dugdale, Esq., 

 are a quantity of very fine and tall oaks, which rival those at Bagot's Park, and are, 

 according to Sir H. Maxwell, of the sessile variety, though when I saw them they 

 were not in leaf. They stand at a considerable elevation, on a dry and seemingly 

 rather shallow red sandstone. Many of them are 100 feet and more in height, with 

 clean trunks of 40 to 60 feet long. 



The best that I could find measured as follows: 112 feet by 13 feet, with a 



