Beech on th edge of the South Downs

[armybloke]

Stumbled across these monsters. The size and age was not exclusive to Beech as a number of Ash were nearby too. Found these quite by accident walking off the beaten track

[testcricket01]

First one is a corker mate

[armybloke]

That beauty was hollow stemmed, had a massive old pruning/branch tear out that left a hole you could crawl into no problem. It had signs of raptor/owl talon score marks at the hole too. It was a monster and about 25m tall.

[Paul Jenks]

A lot of these old pollards date from the Inclosure Acts in the middle of the 1700's. The boundaries were chopped down to form barriers to stop Joe Public coming onto land.

 

Inclosure Act 1773 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Tony Croft aka hamadryad]

nice!

[essential]

Found a similar old beauty while our for a stroll

[essential]

Sorry here's the pics

[David7585]

Interesting pics, thanks for sharing

[woodyguy]

Thanks for sharing. I love old pollarded beech. Bags of character.

The first lot of pictures appear to show beech pollards along a wood bank which was the traditional way of marking out woods from 12th century onwards. They were always pollarded and originally the bank would be very substantial with a ditch and palings along one side. Love to see a bit of living history.

[Lukey-Loki]

Found a similar old beauty while our for a stroll

 

Reminds me a bit of 'the funk' from the mighty boosh