girth of perhaps 8 feet up to a great height. I have no doubt this tree contains 700 to 800 feet of timber.
At Knole Park, near Sevenoaks, there are some splendid trees of the park type, with very wide-spreading limbs, two of which are known as the King and Queen Beeches. The King Beech is surrounded by a fence, and many of its branches are supported by chains. Strutt, who figures it, gives its height as 105 feet by 24 in girth at 13 feet. When I measured it in 1905 it was about 100 feet by 30 in girth at 5 feet, with a bole 10 feet high. It has the largest girth of any beech I know of now standing in England (Plate 12). The Queen Beech is 90 to 100 feet high and 28 feet in girth. I am not sure whether this or the last is the one recorded by Loudon, iii. 1977, as having a diameter of 8 feet 4 inches, a height of 85 feet, and a spread of branches of 352 feet diameter.
There are many fine tall beeches in the park of Earl Bathurst at Cirencester, of which Plate 1 gives a good idea, and shows the reproduction from seed in this part of the park to be very good, though a considerable number of other trees, such as ash and sycamore, are growing as well or better than the young beeches under the shade of the tall ones, which in this view are not so remarkable for their size as for their clean cylindrical trunks.
At Ashridge Park, Bucks, the property of Earl Brownlow, are perhaps the most beautiful and best grown beeches in all England, not in small numbers, but in thousands. Though the soil is neither deep nor rich, being a sort of flinty clay overlying limestone, it evidently suits the beech to perfection, and in some parts of the park there is hardly a tree which is not straight, clean, and branchless for 40 to 60 feet, whilst in other parts, where the soil is heavier and wetter, and where oaks grow among the bracken to a great size, the beeches are of a more branching and less erect type.
The largest and finest beech, from a timber point of view, at Ashridge, known as the King Beech, was blown down about 1891, and was purchased for ₤36 by Messrs. East of Berkhampstead. Loudon says that this tree in 1844 was 114 feet high, with a clear trunk of 75 feet, which was 5 feet 6 inches in girth at that height. Evidently this was less than its real height. Mr. Josiah East tells me that as it stood it had about 90 feet of clean trunk, of which the lower 15 feet was partly rotten and not measured. The sound part was cut into three lengths as follows:—
| 17 | feet × 29 inches, ¼ girth | ... = | 99 | cubic feet. |
| 28 | feet„ × 25 inches,„ ¼ girth„ | ... = | 136 | cubic„ feet.„ |
| 30 | feet„ × 23 inches,„ ¼ girth„ | ... = | 110 | cubic„ feet.„ |
| butt, say, 15 | feet„ × 36 inches,„ ¼ girth„ | ... = | 135 | cubic„ feet.„ |
| 90 | 480 |
The branches were partly rotten and much broken in falling, so that they were only fit for firewood. But the celebrated Queen Beech remains, and though in one or two places it shows slight signs of decay, it may, I hope, live for a century or more, as it is in a fairly sheltered place, and has no large spreading limbs to be torn off by the wind. This extremely perfect and beautiful tree was photographed with great
