20 THE FORESTS OF ENGLAND. 



'the Butcher's Shambles/ the Parliament Oak, and others, 

 are all outside the park, and so are all most fantastic and 

 grotesque old oaks. There also, and nowhere else, are all 

 the graceful and lovely birches so marked a feature of 

 Sherwood and there is the magnificent group of the nine 

 Scotch firs, not far from the Buck Gate, which we knew 

 amongst ourselves as the Nine Muses. Within the park 

 the scenery is very lovely, but comparatively tame, not- 

 withstanding the extensive sheet of water. Its great 

 attractions are certainly not the oaks which are very 

 numerous but not to compare to the Birkland oaks but 

 the avenue of Spanish chesnuts, perhaps the finest in 

 England, and two or three (I forget which) unrivalled 

 beeches near the Proteus Lodge, than which the New 

 Forest itself can show nothing grander. 



"If your readers want to see oaks in majesty and in 

 Weird grotesqueness, let them make their headquarters at 

 Edwinstowe, and wander about Birkland." 



Of Sherwood Forest, Mr Henry Evershed, writing in 

 The Journal of Forestry (vol. iii., page 190), says : 



" If we were asked when Sherwood Forest first became a 

 forest, we reply, ' When was it not one ? ' It was a royal 

 forest before and after the Conquest. From the earliest 

 times all our hunting monarchs paid frequent visits to 

 Sherwood. The Saxon kings came to Edwinstone, the 

 Normans to Clipston. King John was much at Clipston, 

 where the ruins of his 'hunting box' bears his name. 

 Edward I. held a great council under the shade of an oak 

 of gigantic size, whose trunk still stands at the corner of 

 Clipston Park, on the side of the road between Mansfield 

 and Edwinstone, bearing the name of the Parliament Oak. 

 Our last hunting and hawking monarch, James I,, was 

 particularly attached to the same neighbourhood, and 

 came sometimes to Newark, and frequently to Newstead 

 Abbey. Bad times followed, and at the last royal chase 

 which history has recorded, after all the merry meetings 

 that had gone before, Charles I, was himself the quarry. 



