remainder, including the bark, estimated at £14 per ton. Near it is a tree of great height, leaning at an angle of about one in four to one side, though quite firm in the ground ; and it seemed to me that all the trees in this grove owed their great height and clean stems to their having been drawn up by beech trees, many of which are now dead or dying. Close to the Park Lodge are three very curious and picturesque old trees, one of which is called the Venison Oak, because King John is supposed to have dined under it; another, which we christened the Beer-barrel, is an immense burry shell 10 or 12 feet high and 28 feet round, with hardly any branches ; a third we called Gouty Toes, because of a huge swollen root, like a gouty foot, on one side of it.
Dr. Plot, in his Natural History of Staffordshire, p. 213, after speaking of different species of trees growing together, among which were an oak and an ash near Chartley, hollies and oaks at Bagot’s Park, and an oak and thorn at Drayton Basset, goes on to speak of trees “that grow so conjoynd that they seem (after the manner of some sort of animals) to prey upon one another,” and says: “But the most signal example of this kind is the large fair birch, about the bigness of one’s thigh, that grows on the bole of an oak in the lane leading south from Adbaston Church, which has sent down its roots in six branches perpendicularly through the whole length of its trunk and fastened them in the ground, which might be seen in a hole cut in the bottom of the oak; having eaten out the bowells of the old tree (as all the rest will doe) that first gave it life and then support. All which are occasioned, no doubt, by the seeds of those trees dropt by birds in the mould on the boles of the others that lyes commonly there, and is made of the annual rottings of their own leaves.”
He goes on to speak of another great oak, “lying near the Lodge house in Ellen Hall Park, of so vast a bulk that my man upon a horse of 15 hands high, standing on one side of it, and I also on horseback on the other could see no part of each other ” ; and also of an oak that ‘‘ was felled about twenty years since in Wrottesley Park which, as the worthy Sir Walter Wrottesley (a man far from vanity of imposition) seriously told me, was 15 yards in girth.”—‘‘ How much less in bigness and number of tuns the oak might be that grew in the New Park at Dudley, and made the table now lying in the old hall at Dudley Castle, is not remembered, but certainly it must be a tree of prodigious height and magnitude out of which a table all of one plank could be cut, 25 yards 3 inches long and wanting but 2 inches of a yard in breadth for the whole length, from which they were forced (it being so much too long for the hall at Dudley) to cut off 7 yards 9 inches, which is the table in the hall at Corbins Hall hard by, the ancient seat of the Corbins.”
In the park at Merevale Hall, Warwickshire, the seat of W. F. S. Dugdale, Esq., are a quantity of very fine and tall oaks, which rival those at Bagot’s Park, and are, according to Sir H. Maxwell, of the sessile variety, though when I saw them they were not in leaf. They stand at a considerable elevation, on a dry and seemingly rather shallow red sandstone. Many of them are 100 feet and more in height, with clean trunks of 40 to 60 feet long.
The best that I could find measured as follows :—112 feet by 13 feet, with a
