Marquess of Exeter. The best, known as the King Oak, is 100 feet high by 16 feet 6 inches in girth. At Ashridge the oaks are not so fine as the beeches, but the King Oak in that park is a splendid tree, measuring 98 feet by 21 feet 8 inches.
Sherwood Forest, in Nottinghamshire, contains an immense number of very ancient, picturesque, and curious oaks, many of them now mere wrecks, but preserved with care by Earl Manvers, who is the owner of a large area of the unenclosed part of what was formerly a royal forest. I have seen no other place where so many of the trees are covered with immense burrs, and where they assume such extraordinary shapes, as in that part of Sherwood Forest between Edwinstowe and the Buck gate entrance to Thoresby Park. The soil in this district is mostly a poorlooking sand on which the birch thrives remarkably. About seventy years ago the open forest which up to that time had been grazed by sheep, came into the possession of Lord Manvers. An immense quantity of seedling birch then sprang up, and large quantities of acorns were sown to fill up the vacant spaces caused by the decay of the old oaks, most of which are now stag-headed, and dead at the top.
The finest oak now standing in Sherwood Forest is the Queen or Major Oak (Plate 95). This tree, though hollow, and having its branches partly supported by iron stays, is still healthy and vigorous. It measures about 60 feet in height by 30 feet 5 inches in girth, and the spreading roots are about 18 paces round at the ground. The spread of the branches is 30 yards in diameter. It is about three-quarters of a mile from Edwinstowe, and is not far from another tree known as Simon Foster's Oak, which is about 44 feet high and 25 feet in girth.
At Welbeck, the seat of the Duke of Portland, in the same beautiful and wellwooded district, known as the Dukeries, on heavier soil than that at Thoresby, are a number of magnificent oaks which were described and figured in 1790 in a scarce pamphlet by Major Rooke. Of these I saw the Porter Oaks, so called because they stand opposite each other on each side of a gate in the park. When measured by Rooke about 1779 they were as follows:—No. 1. 98 feet high, 23 feet girth at 6 feet; contents, 840 feet. In October 1903, 254 feet; the top having been dead for many years it is now much less in height. No. 2. 88 feet high, 20 feet girth at 6 feet; contents, 744 feet. Now it is 23 feet and rapidly decaying.
Another tree, called by Rooke the "Duke's Walking Stick," of which there is a small figure in Loudon, p. 1766, was in 17709, 111 feet 6 inches high, and 70 feet 6 inches to the first branches; at 6 feet it measured 12 feet in girth, and was estimated to contain 440 cubic feet. A very celebrated oak at Welbeck is the Greendale Oak, which has often been figured and described. In my copy of Strutt there is a good plate of this tree, without number or description, bound at the end of the volume. Tradition says that a bet was made by a former Duke of Portland, that he had an oak so large, that a coach and four could be driven through its trunk, and the hole having been cut, he won his bet. When measured by Rooke it was, above the arch of the hole, 35 feet 3 inches in girth, the hole being 10 feet 3 inches high and 6 feet wide. Even at that time Rooke's figure shows it to have been a mutilated wreck, but the tree is still alive.
Near the Greendale Oak there is a magnificent though dead specimen of burr
