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old heronry at Cobham Hall, Kent, the seat of the Earl of Darnley, a place which contains taller and finer ash trees and hornbeams, and more of them, than any that I have seen in England. Strange to say, Strutt, who figured several trees at Cobham, overlooked these ; but in Francis Thynne’s continuation of Holinshed’s Chronicles, p. 1512, I find the following, which shows that Cobham was renowned for its trees more than three centuries ago. Speaking of William, the last Lord Cobham but one, he says:—
“Besides which, owerpassing his goodlie buildings at the Blackfriers in London, in the year of Christ 1582, and since that the statelie augmenting of his house at Cobham Hall, with the rare garden there ; in which no varietie of strange flowers and trees do want, which praize or price maie obtaine from the farthest part of Europe, or from other strange countries, whereby it is not inferior to the garden of Semiramis.”
The largest ash here, described by Loudon, was a tree 120 feet high, with a trunk 6 feet 8 inches in diameter, straight, and without a branch for a great height. This was perhaps the same whose trunk I saw in July 1905 lying on the ground, where it had fallen several years ago. But those which remain are not only the tallest ash trees, but the tallest trees of any sort with one exception that I have measured in England, and there are so many of them that I can well believe that I did not measure the tallest. The tallest tree, measured in April 1907, by Lord Darnley, is 146 feet high by 12 feet in girth. Another growing by the side of a drive, which he christened Queen Elizabeth’s ash, I measured 143 feet high by 12 feet 7 inches in girth. In the grove near it are several, very nearly if not quite, as tall, one of which I made 141 feet by 13 feet 1 inch, with a bole 50 feet high, and a roughly estimated contents of 700 to 800 feet. (Plate 239.) Another, 140 feet by 12 feet 9 inches, with a bole of 48 feet, which, judging from the large mass of fungus growing on its root, is probably decaying. There are many other trees in this grove which are 125 to 130 feet high, and stand pretty close together, growing in a sheltered situation,’ on what appeared to be a deep but rather sandy loam.
Other remarkable ash trees at Cobham are the Twisted Ash, whose trunk is spiral, and measures 116 feet by 17 feet 9 inches. (Plate 240.) The View Ash, a tree nearer the house, is only about 80 feet high by 17 feet 9 inches at 5 feet, but is 29 feet in girth at the base, and has its trunk and most of its branches covered with green and healthy twigs.
Next to Cobham in respect of its great ash trees is Knole Park, also in Kent, where, in a sheltered valley near the gate from the Sevenoaks Road, called “The Hole in the Wall,” are a number of very fine sound trees, from 125 to 130 feet high or more, and from 13% to 16 feet in girth, one of which has a bole 35 feet long, and probably contains over 700 feet of timber. Here again the soil is a deep sandy loam, which grows splendid beech, oak, and chestnut, but I cannot guess the age of the ash, though they are probably over 200 years.
One of the most perfect examples, from a timber point of view, is a tree growing in a wood called Poultridge, just outside Ashridge Park (Plate 241), which
1 This is about 330 feet above sea-level, and is situated between the Medway and the Thames,