282 



SYLVAN SKETCHES. 



reading-desk of Saint Pancras church, Euston Square, 

 have been made from its timber. 



The trunk of Damorv's Oak, in Dorsetshke, measured 

 sixty-eight feet round ; as this large trunk decayed, it 

 formed a cavity fifteen feet wide, and seventeen high, 

 capable of containing twenty men. Duriug the civil wars 

 after the Restoration, this was inliabited bv an old man 

 who sold ale in it. By the storm of 1703, it lo^t some 

 of its noblest hmbs. In 1755, when fit for nothing but 

 firewood, it was sold for 14/. 



In Suffolk is, or was very lately, an Oak of whidi the 

 trunk measured thuty-five feet round. It was hollow in 

 the time of Queen Elizabeth, of whom it is reported that, 

 in her youth, she would often take her stand under it to 

 shoot at the deer as they passed. It is hence called 

 Queen Elizabeth's Oak. This does not appear an occu- 

 pation worthv of Elizabeth. 



Of Eisher's Oak, a ti'ee of immense bulk^ about 17 

 miles from London, in the way to Tunbridge, it is said that 

 when King J ames the First travelled that way, a school- 

 master of the neighbourhood, and all his scholars, decked 

 with oaken gai'lands, came out of the tree in great num- 

 bers, and entertained the king with an oration. They 

 have a tradition at Tunbridge that thirteen men on 

 horseback were once sheltered within tliat Oak. 



In Stirling are the ruins of an old Oak supposed to 

 have been the largest tree that ever grew in Scotland ; 

 around which are the vestiges of one of those circles at- 

 tributed to the Druids. When William Wallace roused 

 the Scotch to oppose Edward, he often assembled his 

 army at TorAvood, and this Oak is said to have been his 

 head-quarters. Hence it has ever since borne the title of 

 Wallace's Oak. 



