Where can you find ancient trees today?
What is it about this UK landscape that sets it apart from mainland Europe? Cast your eyes over the patchwork of fields, hedges and woodland and you start to see a few of the reasons. In most parts of the UK, you will see ancient trees scattered though the landscape.
According to experts, the number of ancient trees in the UK is exceptional compared with elsewhere in Europe.
However, the sheer extent of the UK�s ancient tree population is not properly understood. Distribution is patchy; in some areas ancient trees are abundant, in others scarce.
Today, many of the surviving ancient trees can be found in the vestiges of the once extensive system of Royal Hunting forests and their successors, the more formalised medieval deer parks.
Scattered groups of trees can also be found in historic parkland, wood pasture and ancient wooded commons with small groups and individual specimens to be found in the midst of housing estates and urban parks, on farmland, village greens, churchyards and within the grounds of old historic buildings.
In the open countryside, scattered across much of England, ancient black poplars can be found on flood plains in meadows and occasionally in ancient hedges.
Ancient ash clings to limestone rock in the Northern dales. In the Derbyshire dales, coppiced lime stools are so old that the rock that they sit on has eroded away from their roots, giving the appearance that the tree is supported by stilts.
In the Scottish Borders, ancient wood pasture oaks can be found at Cadzow and Dalkeith and ancient Scots pine survive in the Caledonian Forest way up in the Highlands.
Wales also has a history of hunting forests, a few of which were Royal Forests, where occasional ancient trees can still be found. In addition, old parkland oak survive in ancient parks such as Dinefwr Park and Chirk Park.
How do you recognise an ancient tree?
Like people, trees grow and age at different rates depending on where they are and what happens to them during their lifetime. But here�s a rough guide to when trees start to be of interest to the Ancient Tree Hunt, based on our hug method of measurement.
The 'hug' method for measuring trees
A hug is based on the finger tip to finger tip measurement of an adult, which we take to be about 1.5m. This distance is usually almost the same as your height, and means you can measure a tree even if you forget your tape measure!
The trees below might be ancient if they measured the following:
Oak � 3 adult hugs
Beech � 2 adult hugs
Scots Pine� 1 adult hug
Rowan � one adult hug
Birch � a wrist hug
Hawthorn � an elbow hug
Cedar of Lebanon � 2 hugs
Other more technical methods of recognising ancient trees include:
Size:
For most species, girth can be a useful indicator whether a tree is ancient or not and some rules of thumb do exist. However altitude, climate, growing conditions and if the tree has been pollarded or cut in the past can affect the rate at which the tree grows and is therefore only a guide to aging a tree.
Example for an oak tree:
* Trees with a girth of more than 4.5m or 3 hugs are potentially interesting
* Trees with girth of more than 5m or 3.5 hugs are valuable in terms of conservation
* Trees with a girth of more than 6m or 4 hugs are likely to be truly ancient
Age:
Without cutting down a tree and counting the annual growth rings it is difficult to age a tree and some trees are hollow so for them it is even more of a challenge. Different species of tree live for a varying number of years. A 100 year-old willow or birch tree would be ancient, but a 200 year-old beech would just be starting to become interesting, an oak tree just maturing, and a yew tree only a young tree.
Characteristics:
The more of the following characteristics* a tree has, the more likely it is to be ancient:
* Girth is large for the tree species concerned
* Major trunk cavities or progressive hollowing
* Naturally forming water pools
* Decay holes
* Physical damage to trunk
* Bark loss
* Large quantities of dead wood in the canopy
* Sap runs
* Crevices in the bark, under branches or on the root plate, sheltered from direct rainfall
* Fungal fruiting bodies (from heart rotting species)
* A high number of interdependent wildlife species
* Epiphytic plants
* An �old� look
* High aesthetic interest, also known as the �wow� factor
In addition, the tree may also have:
* A pollard form or show indications of past management
* A cultural/historic value
* A prominent position in the landscape
However, some ancient trees may exhibit few of these features while young trees that have been damaged (eg by fire) may exhibit them.
