BY DR. DERHAM. 



25 



Ray's notes in these years, viz., October the 14th, 1669. 

 " We rode to see the famous fir trees, some two miles and 

 a half distant from Newport, in a village called Wareton, 

 in Shropshire, on the land of Mr. Skrimshaw (Skrymsher). 

 There are of them thirty-five in number, very tall and strait, 

 without any boughs till towards the top. The greatest, 

 and which seems to have been the mother of the rest, we 

 found, by measure, to be fourteen feet and a half round 

 the body, and they say fifty-six yards high, which to me 

 seemed not incredible. The tenant's name of the house, 

 close by these fir trees, is Firchild, whose ancestors have 

 been tenants to it for many generations."* 



* Wishing to know the present state of these trees, I wrote to the 

 Reverend W. Leighton, of Lucefield, near Shrewsbury, who kindly made in- 

 quiries of his friend, R. S. Higgins, esq., surgeon, Newport, and to whom I 

 am indebted for the following communication, in a letter to Mr. Leighton on 

 the subject : 



" The fir trees at Warton are mentioned in an old book of my father's, en- 

 titled ^ eEOAOBOTONOAoriA sive Historia Vegetabilium Sacra; or a 

 Scripture Herbal, by William Westmacott, of the borough of Newcastle- 

 under-Line, in. the county of Stafford, Physician,' London, 1694. ' Fir tree : 

 There are thirty-six of this sort grow disorderly, of an excessive height, at 

 Warton (on the land of the Right Worshipful Sir Charles Skrymsher of 

 Norbury in. this county) in the hedges and fields, many of them being about 

 forty yards high, and one of them is forty-seven yards and a half, having the 

 advantage of a rising ground, they appear pleasantly, as so many spire 

 steeples to travellers, and at a far distance on the roads, particularly as you 

 ride Worcester Road from Tonge Castle to Newport.' The extract from 

 Ray says there are of them thirty-five in number, and the greatest fifty-six 

 yards high ; so that he must have visited them after Westmacott. I find 

 Ray died in his 78th year, in 1705. Westmacott, in another part of his 

 Herbal, speaks of having been in practice in 1674, and may have visited the 

 trees some years before his work was published. I do not think his descrip- 

 tion is taken from Dr. Plot's Natural History of the county, or he would 

 have acknowledged it ; for he quotes Plot in some instances, and also Ray. 

 Some time ago I inquired respecting the Worcester Road, and was informed 

 it crossed the London Road at Whiston Cross, four miles beyond Shiffinal. 

 The distance from Warton is about fifteen miles. 



" In Pitts ' Topographical History of Staffordshire,' 1817, department the 

 second, page 166, {Walton is evidently a misprint,) 'A fir tree grew at Walton, 

 in the parish of Norbury, six yards about, and forty-seven yards high, according 

 to admeasurements of it by three distinct persons, at tliree different times.' 



" I find no mention of the fir trees in the ' Natural History of the County 

 of Stafford' by Mr. Garner, recently published. Withering, in the first edition 

 of his Botany, 1776, vol. ii, 593, says, ' Pinus picea, yew-leaved, Abies 

 Ray, syn. 411. The thirty-six fine trees of this species mentioned by Mr. 

 Ray as growing at Wareton, near Newport in Shropsliirc, arc now no more.' 

 Withering first settled at Stafford, and appears to have been at Aqualate 



