A living history book – Recording our ancient trees

A guest blog from one of our amazing volunteers, Alison Hutton, who has been trained by the Woodland Trust to help add our precious trees to the National Ancient Tree Inventory.

A living history book – Recording our ancient trees

Among the precious natural species in the Tarras Valley Nature Reserve (although strictly in the Esk valley) are the ancient oaks of Longwood.  These trees were described as ancient in the early eighteenth century.  If they were ancient then they are much more ancient now, very old and very battered.  When you think that the trees we are seeing today were probably growing before the famous court case that is the basis of the Common Riding in 1759, before the American revolution in 1775 and civil war in 1861, before Queen Victoria, before the world wars and hundreds of years before all of us now, it is little wonder that the trees are so very old and look their age.  They have had a long and hard life.  Their response has simply been to keep on keeping on.  Apart from the woodman’s axe nothing can stop them.

Walking among the oaks you gradually become aware that there are no trees that look roughly middle-aged.  Every single one is beyond mature. Centuries of grazing has eliminated younger seedlings of all trees.  Since the nineties, when grazing was eventually stopped  there are  slow-growing oak saplings two or three feet high just waiting for more light and food to grow every season.  Only another fifty years! and they will be a real presence in the wood., with more yougsters coming after them.

Thousands of quick growing birch seedlings have grown up in the last 30 years to shade and compete for nutrients with the oaks. One of the first actions of the new nature reserve was to arrange for “halo-ing” many of the oaks to give them a chance of light and food.  This is why you can see many heaps of birchwood surrounding each tree.  Rotting birch will provide homes for insects, birds, fungi, fern, lichens, feed the soil and much else. And oak trees themselves, whether alive or dead, give a home to hundreds, if not thousands of different species; they are our most important trees.

It seems important to record these oaks because they are an historic group of trees and the TVNR should know how many trees there are and where they sit.  Each one is having it’s position noted using the most precise Ordnance Survey reference (10 figures), accompanied by a photo and some measurements.  The oaks spread from the Round House into and beyond Jenny Noble’s gill, with many more on the east of the old railway banking towards Broomholm.

The recent storm has broken a couple of the trees, one just before the Jenny Noble’s path and one just after.  It’s a shame but it will be very interesting to see how they respond to such a dramatic event.

For those who enjoy some botany these oaks are generally the sessile oak, (quercus petraea), their acorns do not have a stem but their leaves do. They are trees of the north rather than the south where the english oak (quercus robur) is more often found.