The 2004 AGM address. Veteran trees in Essex
However it is to the wood-pasture sites that we must look to, to provide us with our best veteran
tree records. These include our ancient royal forests and our deer parks. Essex is an unusual and
privileged county in that it has the substantial remains of five forests - Epping, Hainault, Writtle,
Hatfield and Kingswood - and many old parkland sites. If one looks at all the counties that surround
Essex (Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Middlesex, Surrey and Kent) you will not find any
ancient royal forests, although a fragment of Windsor strays over the Berkshire border into Surrey
and Middlesex had its Enfield Chase destroyed in 1777. Historically such forests were often based
on a pre-existing tract of common land and with this usually went common rights that included
grazing livestock. The presence of animals in turn meant that the trees would be managed as pollards,
that is cut at a height at which the commonable beasts could not reach the regrowth and hence often
significant numbers of pollard trees would be found. Forests in Essex had multiple owners and
users - the Crown, lords of the manors and commoners and this complexity of owners and those
with common rights helped the survival of this archaic system of land management into the 20th
century Pollarding trees indefinitely prolongs their life span and enables trees to grow and live
well beyond their normal life span giving us the wonderful pollard trees we see in Epping Forest
today.
The UK is said to have an estimated 85% of the veteran trees to be found in N.W. Europe (see The
Champion Trees of Britain and Ireland by Owen Johnson 2002). Essex has a minimum of the
following ancient trees at its wood-pasture sites -
Epping Forest 72,000 (actually 100,000 might be closer)
Hainault Forest 6,000
Hatfield Forest 800
Parks 500 - 1000 (a clearer estimate is needed)
This indicates Essex has some 80,000 ancient, mainly pollard, trees and yet does not include the
many probably thousands of surviving pollard trees in hedgerows or ancient coppice stools growing
in ancient woodland. Thus it is fairly safe to say that Essex has an internationally important population
of veteran trees, important in the context of N.W. Europe.
Epping Forest actually has a greater population of ancient trees than the New Forest and Essex with
the Barrington Hall Oak (girth just under 38 ft. c. 11.5 m.) has a larger girthed Oak than the Major
Oak in Sherwood Forest.
The county has unfortunately lost many ancient trees, the Hempstead Oak with a girth of 53 ft.
(16m) was one of the largest Oaks to have occurred in the UK, surviving into the 1850s.The famous
Forest Oaks are all gone - Fairlop (Hainault), Fairmead (Epping) and the Doodle Oak (Hatfield)
arc all long dead and decayed away. Over the last 120 years Epping Forest has seen many trees,
probably tens of thousands, felled and destroyed. Wooded commons another type of wood-pasture
have also seen great losses - Childerditch Common was surveyed in 1774 and consisted of over
2000 Oak pollards by 1805 it had been incorporated into Thorndon Park and all its pollards bar a
handful grubbed out along with 1,300 Hornbeams. Diseases such as Dutch Elm Disease have also
taken their toll. Essex was probably the pre-eminent elm county with its fair share of ancient elms,
all the best now gone .. .the Waltham Abbey Elm, the Great Saling Elm, the Smugglers Elms at
Paglesham and who knows how large was Adam's Elm at Leigh - it was large enough to be marked
on the Chapman and Andre map of 1777 and was probably so called because of its age. Dutch Elm
Disease has also robbed us of the fine, probably 300 year old, Elm avenue at Littley Park, only a
few massive shorn dead pollard trunks now exist.
10
Essex Naturalist (New Series) 21 (2004)