154 OUR FORESTS AND WOODLANDS 



according to its quality and dimensions. But it 

 had more than a mere market value in those 

 ancient days. Gilbert White tells us how pollard 

 ash trees were still standing which had been 

 cleft and held asunder by wedges, so that rup- 

 tured children, stripped naked, should be passed 

 through the cleft ; and as the parts of the tree, 

 beplastered with loam and swathed in bands, 

 grew together again, so the babes became cured 

 of their infirmity. 



Another curious piece of old folk-lore was 

 the veneration paid to the 'shrew-ash,' usually 

 some old pollard tree, whose twigs and branch- 

 lets, used as stroking-rods, had the power of 

 curing horses, cattle, or sheep of the pain in 

 the limbs and anguish caused by a shrew-mouse 

 running over them or what we now call rheu- 

 matism, and ascribe to other causes. A * shrew- 

 ash ' was made by boring a hole into an ash stem, 

 placing a live shrew-mouse in it, and plugging it 

 in with now long-forgotten incantations. Once 

 medicated in this way the shrew-ash retained its 

 healing virtue so long as it lived, and in the good 

 old days every village and each farmyard had a 

 tree of this sort always ready for an emergency. 



