THE CHESNUT. 89 



of the country, all these were once united in one 

 stem; that their grandfathers once remembered this, 

 when it was looked upon as the glory of the forest, 

 and visited from all quarters; that for many years 

 past, it had been reduced to the venerable ruin we 

 beheld. We began to examine it with more atten- 

 tion, and found that there is an appearance that these 

 five trees were really once united in one. The open- 

 ing in the middle is at present prodigious ; and it does, 

 indeed, require faith to believe that so vast a space 

 was once occupied by solid timber. But there is no 

 appearance of bark on the inside of any of the stumps, 

 nor on the sides that are opposite to one another. Mr. 

 Glover and I measured it separately, and brought it 

 exactly to the same size, viz. two hundred and four feet 

 round. If this was once united in one solid stem, it 

 must with justice, indeed, have been looked upon as 

 a very wonderful phenomenon in the vegetable world, 

 and deservedly styled the glory of the forest. I have 

 since been told by the Canonico Recupero, an ingeni- 

 ous ecclesiastic of this place, that he was at the expense 

 of carrying up peasants with tools to dig round the 

 Castagno dei cento cavalli^ and he assures me, upon 

 his honour, that he found all these stems united below 

 ground in one root. I alleged that so extraordinary 

 an object must have been celebrated by many of their 

 writers; he told me that it had, and produced several 

 examples." 



In most parts of Britain the chesnut thrives well, 

 there being authenticated anecdotes of many very large 

 ones, in various parts of England and Ireland. Nor 

 is it confined to the southern parts of the islands, for 

 there is one in the garden at Castle Leod, in Ross- 

 shire, which measures at least fifteen feet in circum- 

 ference, and which, only a few years ago, shewed no 

 signs of decay. Nor is it by any means a slow-growing 

 tree; for in Kensington Gardens, and other places, 



VOL. II. 8* 





