Common Oak 319 



straight bole 65 feet long; 107 feet by 15 feet, with a clean bole of 70 feet, and 

 probably containing about 600 feet of timber; 107 feet by 17 feet 3 inches, with 

 a bole 48 feet long, and about the same cubic contents as the last; 114 feet by 

 15^- feet, bole about 60. This last is, I believe, the same tree which Mr. Dugdale 

 had measured some years ago, when it was thought to be 133 feet high ; but I do 

 not think it can be nearly so much, the sloping ground on which it stands making a 

 base line difficult to get. He tells me that these trees are believed to have been 

 planted by the monks who lived at Merevale Abbey at the foot of the hill, which 

 would make them at least 370 years old, and that most of them have now passed 

 their best. The timber being very straight in the grain is largely used for cleaving 

 spokes. 



Chirk Castle in Denbighshire, the seat of R. Myddleton, Esq., and one of the 

 most ancient inhabited castles in England, is in a park full of oaks, most of which 

 I believe to be of the sessile variety. They are not of great age, having been 

 planted, as Mr. Parker, agent for the property, told me, after the Commonwealth, 

 but are remarkable on account of their uniformly straight boles 30 to 60 feet high. 

 They grow on millstone-grit, where the rock comes very near the surface, on land 

 where the pedunculate variety would not, I think, make nearly such fine trees. I 

 only measured two, one just below the castle which was 100 feet by 1 1 feet 8 inches, 

 with a straight clean bole of 60 feet ; another, probably of greater age, about 90 feet 

 by 18 feet 2 inches, was beginning to decay at the base. A curious growth is seen 

 on an oak in this drive, a branch having grown out of one stem into another, some- 

 what in the same style as the beech in Plate 4 of this work. 



The trees in the Great Park of Windsor have been described by many writers, 

 and especially by the late Mr. William Menzies in a rare folio published by Longmans 

 in 1864,^ which gives photographs of some of the finest trees, these being, so far as 

 I know, the first large photographic plates of trees published, and, considering the 

 imperfect development of the art forty years ago, wonderfully good. 



They show Queen Victoria's Favourite Oak, which was chosen by her late 

 Majesty shortly after her accession, and which stands with the three other royal 

 trees between High Standing Hill and New Lodge. This is a very well shaped 

 tree of fair size, 70 feet high and 1 1 feet in girth when Menzies measured it in 

 1864. Now, as I am informed by Mr. Simmonds, it has increased only 9 inches 

 in girth. Queen Anne's Oak, a very handsome tree in shape, but past its prime, 

 though supposed to be only 400 years old, measured 60 feet in height by 15 feet 

 3 inches in girth. Queen Charlotte's Oak, a tree of no special beauty, was 65 feet 

 high by 17 feet 3 inches in girth. The great Pollard Oak at Forest Gate, known 

 as William the Conqueror's Oak, and figured in the Supplement to Gardeners 

 Chronicle, 31st October 1874, supposed by Menzies to be 800 years old, though 

 about 37 feet in girth, and the largest in the forest, is now a wreck ; but 

 there are near the Prince Consort's chapel, and in the Cowpond grove, many 

 beautiful tall and straight-grown oaks, one of which, growing near the culvert of the 

 pond, measured by me in March 1904, was from 114 to 118 feet high and 10 feet 



' History of Windsor Great Park and Windsor Forest. 



