4/2/2023 0 Comments Boundary oaks golf courseThe idea is that in 1602 Queen Elizabeth sat under the tree and was thus honoured thereafter. It was also the edge of the Honour of Gloucester’s land. The previous Oak of Honor was thought to be much older and was a boundary tree for the old vice-counties of Kent and Surrey. 15,000 people conducted a mass trespass on 10th October 1897 to challenge the Honor Oak & Forest Hill golf club’s attempts to fence and enclose the hill. One Tree Hill gets its name from the single English oak (pictured) which was replanted in 1905 when the hill was reopened to the public after a battle to save it from becoming a golf course. Today it is returning to woodland having been largely managed through non-intervention, bar access works and hedge planting, by the Friends of One Tree Hill and Southwark Council. One Tree Hill is a good case study for remnant Great North Wood sites as it was open land until the mid-20th century but was woodland on the north-western slopes up until the 1840s. We may have to accept that these landmarks of the Great North Wood have a limited time left. These oaks may be so unused to management that pollarding them will kill them off. Lapsed beech pollards are known to die when pollarded again. Logic says that pollarding it again and removing some of the surrounding growth would allow the trees to re-balance and go on living indefinitely, but experimental pollarding taking place in Epping Forest suggests otherwise. This oak, one down from the previous, has clearly been pollarded (c.1900s) and is now swamped by other trees. The tree is actually in the grounds of the Honor Oak Allotments and a line of similarly old oaks can be found running up alongside it. The image above is a pollarded English oak ( Quercus robur) at the entrance to One Tree Hill on Honor Oak Park. Sometimes the old maps show trees dotted along the edges. The best trick is really to get an old map, compare it with a current one and see if there are any clear boundaries where trees may have been planted or perhaps wild trees maintained as standards. The great Oliver Rackham told us that ‘ancient woods are not the place to look for ancient trees’. The oldest trees are usually living in isolation in what has longest been open land. One of the first mistakes made by those (myself included, of course) looking for old trees in the landscape is to head for woodland first. The boundaries of the farms were marked by old oaks. The landscape swelling into Lewisham shows much of south London’s old landscape was farmland. There is no woodland at all but plenty of shrubs, likely including gorse and hawthorn. The Dulwich Woods are very likely several thousand years old. That could have been thousands of years ago, however. It once connected with the Dulwich Woods which skirt the left hand side of that image, and spread even further before humans began managing the woods. The earlier map, dated 1799, shows that One Tree Hill was an isolated ancient woodland. This old image (likely early 1900s) shows what One Tree Hill’s western slopes were like. Their carbon storage capabilities should be remembered by those controlling planting regimes in cities today. The Forestry Commission approximates that London’s trees are worth £43billion in their environmental and amenity value. The oaks remain where other species have disappeared as they are tough, long-living (sometimes 800 years in open land) and are of great use to our species. Its origins are in the wildwoods that spread after the end of the last glacial period 10-12,000 years ago at the start of the Holocene. It was worked over centuries for its timber and underwood (sessile oak, hornbeam and hazel, mainly) for ship building, tannin extraction and charcoal burning. The Great North Wood was a landscape of woods and commons that stretched from Selhurst to Deptford. One Tree Hill (centre left) when it was ancient woodland in 1799 The Great North Wood Along with the Dulwich Woods and One Tree Hill, these trees are the strongest ties to the much diminished Great North Wood. The southern towns of Southwark were once the parish of Camberwell and its boundary with Lewisham still supports centuries-old oak trees that were the previous markers between old Camberwell and Lewisham. This search has not taken place in the English countryside, instead the border of the London boroughs of Southwark and Lewisham. This post is part of my oaks of London projectįor the past five years I have been searching hedge lines, woods, parks and boundaries for the undulating mass of an old oak.
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