Veteran Trees and Wood Pasture – a Herefordshire Perspective

Science & Opinion This article is provided by the Ancient Tree Forum, which Veteran trees and champions the biological, cultural and heritage value of Britain’s ancient and veteran trees, and gives advice on their management at wood pasture – a www.ancienttreeforum.co.uk. Herefordshire The regular production of wood in the presence of grazing and browsing animals required the temporary enclosing of areas for regeneration, and cutting the branches perspective of mature trees just above the ‘browse line’ produced squat ‘pollards’ which can grow to a great size and longevity. These David Lovelace pollards produced a regular crop of branch wood for diverse uses including feeding In 1217 Henry III granted 100 oaks gathering branch and wind-blown wood, leaves to livestock. Apart from their obvious to the manor Kilpeck from the royal quarrying, bark stripping and collecting utility, such pollards endured for centuries ‘Forest of Aconbury’, probably for honey. A survey of 1325 records that because their hollowing trunks made them Kilpeck Castle. The core of this ‘forest’ the ‘Forest of Deerfold’ in north-west unsuitable for timber and their great girth is Aconbury Wood just south of Herefordshire contained ‘200 acres of great awkward to fell with axe and saw. Hereford and it is still growing fine oak trees and pasture with common rights all timber today. year and underwood valued at 6s 8d and The more frequent and detailed Tudor pannage 5s [swine grazing on acorns]’. accounts give a clearer picture of trees and Despite the importance of timber to the An account of 1260 indicates that the their uses in the Herefordshire countryside, county’s medieval infrastructure and royal forest of Hay (formerly occupying describing pollard trees as ‘shells’, ‘dotards’, buildings, which included a new bridge a 2,000ha tract of countryside just south ‘stubbs’ or ‘burr trees’. A Latin manuscript over the River Wye and replacing the shaft of Hereford) was mostly open and that account from 1585 of a former wood of Hereford’s main water mill, documents only the central part had a continuous pasture in my own parish of Norton Canon (in Latin at this time) concerning ‘foresta’ canopy. As elsewhere in England and refers to its trees as ‘arbores veterens’. and ‘boscus’ show that timber trees Wales, medieval and Tudor Herefordshire were a minor and occasional product. ‘forest’ and ‘woods’ were multi-purpose, With the passing of the manorial feudal Translation and analysis of the surviving structurally diverse land-use systems for era, much of Herefordshire’s extensive manuscripts concerning the use of forests which the term ‘wood pasture’ would be wood pasture had become enclosed and woods demonstrate that they were the nearest approximation. These often farmland or coppice woodland by the quite different from what we understand the extensive areas of more marginal land 17th century. However, mature trees terms to mean today. The main activities were augmented by many enclosed private and traditional ways of managing them were typically grazing, hunting, coppicing, parks. remained an integral part of the general A 1577 map of Bringewood Chase, north Herefordshire, showing the deer, cut and uncut pollards and some enclosures being taken out of the chase. 48 49 Science & Opinion countryside. A 1754 timber valuation with maps of Bidney Farm near Dilwyn (which has no known history of association with forest, wood or park) described 435 out its total of 1,111 trees (oak, ash, elm, aspen and one beech) as being ‘lopped’ or ‘cropped’. Timber sale notices in the local press also give an idea of the prevalence of mature trees. In 1797, for example, the Croft Estate advertised in the Hereford Journal that it had ‘a large quantity of remarkable fine oak and other timber, now growing, consisting of about 4,000 oaks a considerable part of immense size, 800 ash some very large and capital, 1,000 elm, beech, asp and birch’, although these would have included the trees in the parkland and coppice woodland as well as the farms. The most accurate and detailed evidence we have about mature trees in the countryside comes a little late in history, but nonetheless the first-edition 25-inches-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey series of maps of Britain published Historic tree locations through digital mapping: geo-referenced 1885 map overlaying modern around 1880 plotted every mature vertical aerial photography, Middleton-on-the-Hill parish. non-woodland tree. These maps, now available online, represented the pinnacle of British cartography (the second edition produced around 1905 removed field trees apart from in parkland). Comparing our present-day tree-scapes with this first edition shows just how much we have lost. This ancient yew tree is accurately depicted on the 1840 tithe map and marks the parish Nonetheless these maps are an essential boundary between Garway and Kentchurch. 50 51 Science & Opinion guide to landscape restoration plans and vital for identifying surviving groups of previously unknown ancient trees, which are often found flourishing in the corner of a Herefordshire field. Trees have been documented as boundary markers since Saxon times so it is no surprise to find them on parish boundaries. The parish ‘tithe maps’ for Herefordshire, created around 1840, frequently mark trees on parish boundaries along with their species. The yew at the bottom of page 50, for example, defines the Garway parish boundary with Kentchurch, and its location is accurately depicted on the tithe map. All such surviving parish boundary trees deserve statutory protection. There can be an impression that ancient trees tend to occur in royal forests or parks, yet the evidence, for Herefordshire at least, is that well-known ancient tree populations, such as in Moccas or Kentchurch parks, were not that unusual throughout the It is not only in designated parks or royal forests that veteran trees and wood pasture occur: oaks in pasture at Moor Abbey Farm, Middleton on the Hill, whose owner values his heritage of field trees. county as late as Victorian times. We are still discovering ancient trees singly and in clusters throughout the county. Those currently mapped on the Ancient Tree Hunt website are probably less than half of the total resource of ancient trees in Herefordshire. Ancient trees are comparatively rare in continental Europe so the UK population is a significant fraction of the total for all Europe, and since Herefordshire may have one of the highest numbers for any UK county, we have an international responsibility to record and look after them. As well as their historical, cultural and aesthetic value, ancient trees are unique island ecosystems by virtue of the long continuity of assemblages of organisms from fungi to bat roosts. The evolved decay processes that characterise a tree’s longevity are symbiotic with a wide range of species, many highly specialised and endangered. The ‘stag headed’ oak which is celebrated in the works of artists such as the engraver Thomas Bewick (1753–1828) is the natural consequence of ‘retrenchment’ as the tree concentrates its resources away from the extremities. A healthy ‘bottle-shaped’ ancient oak pollard in pasture at Moor Abbey Farm, with its main vertical branches dying off naturally. Such an oak will carry on living for many centuries more. It is being used here as a spiritual backdrop to yoga practice. 50 51 Science & Opinion Before and after: unnecessary destruction of an ancient oak pollard on the road into Hereford. City and road-side trees are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the whims of local authorities and their contractors. Most current farming practice is hostile to ancient trees. All the side limbs of this ancient chestnut have been lopped off for the convenience of arable machinery and the land ploughed close to its roots. Moccas Park (not within that part designated National Nature Reserve). A rare example of oak trees allowed to spread their branches far and wide so that they are able to lie on the ground. This reduces the shear forces on the trunk, avoiding limb loss. National Trust, Brockhampton estate. 52 53 Science & Opinion Using digital mapping methods, past farming practice, urban and transport colleges need to become more aware of landscapes can be analysed by creating development and of late tree diseases the value and needs of ancient trees and sequences of geo-referenced historic maps such as ash dieback and acute oak promote understanding of them. People – aerial photographs along with recently decline. Probably the greatest threat in the expanding tree warden network released LIDAR (light detection and ranging) remains ignorance – ignorance of the can inform and liaise with local authority scans. These are giving us unprecedented irreplaceable value of these extraordinary officers and politicians on tree issues. Of insights into the history and archaeology examples of living history, ignorance of increasing concern is the outsourcing of of woods, wood pasture and trees. One the way they can be managed without tree works and the associated responsibility example is the comparison of 1880 maps being destroyed and ignorance about to transnational companies through opaque with the RAF aerial photographs of the their extent and locations. contracts. late 1940s which show that the combined impact of the Kaiser and Hitler upon our The tide is, however, turning thanks to Current technology is our friend in these countryside and its ancient trees was organisations such as the Woodland endeavours with the free availability of negligible compared with the wholesale Trust, the Ancient Tree Forum and county high-resolution aerial photography, historic destruction wreaked by subsidised Wildlife Trusts and the increasing numbers maps online and open source Geographic agriculture and forestry since the 1950s. of volunteer tree spotters, surveyors and Information Systems (GIS) such as QGIS to Herefordshire suffered no less than other campaigners.

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