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. 
