A HISTORY OF CUMBERLAND 



oak plantations made by the trustees during the eighteenth century, 

 when the outlook was very gloomy for the maintenance of the supply 

 of timber for the navy, are now fine specimens of typical, old-fashioned 

 English arboriculture. 



Though comparatively small in extent, the woods and plantations 

 on the Castlerigg and Derwentwater estates show how well pleasure and 

 profit can be combined for the owner under a continuity of careful, well 

 considered and methodical management. The woods (645 acres) com- 

 prise 28 acres of ornamental plantations and shelter-belts, 181 acres of 

 woods treated partly for ornament and partly for profit by a system of 

 selection fellings (such as were also included within the term thinnings, 

 under the old-fashioned system of British Arboriculture), and 406 acres 

 of plantations of different ages (but mostly mature or approaching full 

 maturity) treated purely upon commercial principles. Careful estimates 

 made in 1900 show that these 406 acres are now (after heavy regular 

 thinnings carried out periodically) stocked with 44,019 trees, containing 

 458,371 cubic feet of timber. 



In the old woods, aggregating about 350 acres in extent and con- 

 sisting mainly of crops of oak formed about 100 and 150 years ago, 

 when oak for shipbuilding seemed likely to be able to command a high 

 price in future, the timber may now be regarded as fully mature. 

 Measurements made from borings showing the annual rings of several 

 of the trees prove that they have taken from 15 to 21 years to increase 

 by one inch in radius (or 6f- inches in girth), and the rate of growth 

 is not at all likely to increase now. Some survivors of the larch appa- 

 rently put out to nurse the oak are now splendid trees, girthing up to 

 7 and even 8 feet, and in one case attaining a circumference of 10 feet 

 at breast-height. 



The chief of the conifer plantations is a block of 200 acres (Coomb 

 Wood), an outlying plantation formed in 1846-8, of larch with slight 

 admixture of spruce in moist parts and Scots pine in exposed places. 

 Here the rate of growth ascertained from the stems showed that they have 

 taken from i o to 1 6 years to increase by the last inch of radius (or 6|- 

 inches in girth), representing a current increase of over 3 per cent, on 

 the trees now forming the crop. Methodical and carefully kept estate 

 accounts show (i) that this plantation was made at a cost of about 2 

 an acre (there being then no necessity for expensive wire-netting against 

 rabbits) on land the fee-simple of which was not more than i an acre, 

 and (2) that from a very early age this wood, being periodically thinned 

 in sections, has yielded thinnings almost regularly year by year. As for 

 some years past these thinnings have really been of the nature of partial 

 clearances of the maturing (and nearly mature) crop, which have thus 

 already liquidated a portion of its capital value, the stock of 53 to 

 55-year-old timber is not so large per acre as it otherwise would have 

 been ; but, as the grazing (of good quality) in the now rather open 

 wood is let along with other pasture land at about five shillings an acre, 

 this of itself forms an improved income from what the land could 



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