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Remarkable Oaks
Curiously enough
Lynn Hughes
Encounters with Remarkable Oaks
We in the British Isles are beneficiaries to a legacy of venerable trees richer than any other country in Western Europe. An inheritance that is always in danger of being squandered – even here in Carmarthenshire where we are handsomely endowed.
That so many specimen native trees, some from primeval forest, have survived for us to enjoy is remarkable considering widespread clearance for farming over four millennia, and the vast demand for timber over the centuries in construction, ship-building, furniture-making and fuel, not least for the charcoal that facilitated metallurgy and industry.
Most people are blind or indifferent to individual trees, noticing them only when they are considered a nuisance, or deemed a necessity for felling or burning.
In all our lives mature trees are the largest and oldest living objects we will ever encounter. Each individual - while owning its species appearance - is unique in character and signature, and was alive with our ancestors.
A mature oak in terms of biodiversity is lunch, bed and breakfast to more insect and animal species than any other tree. Its ten miles of stem, branch, and twig, and its hundred thousand leaves, transpire 40 gallons of moisture 100 feet into the air each summer day. It also absorbs vast quantities of carbon dioxide each night, can live up to six hundred years and in full fighting form weigh in at forty tons.
Carmarthenshire deserves to be famous for its venerable and specimen oaks. Legend has it that retired seadogs would carry acorns in their pockets and plant oaks when out walking. Trafalgar hero Admiral Foley of Brown Hill, Llansadwrn, is said to have planted that fine avenue of oaks to the north of Talley lakes, under the hill once called Calvaria. Some of them look to me to be older than 1805, but, as tree expert Alan Mitchell once said ‘Most trees look older than they are, except for yews which are older than they look.’
Llandovery has, or had, one of the most splendid oaks in the county (20’ at girth), until a storm laid it low beside the iron bridge. Now all that remains standing is its lopped and mummified cadaver.
Another casualty, and daddy of them all, unknown and uncelebrated though marked on some early parish maps, is the Golden Grove Oak, lying some fifty paces south west of the eponymous mansion. Recumbent and at rest now - a victim of fungal heart-rot - its impressive girth is forty feet (12m), making it the largest oak in Wales if not Great Britain. Record oaks at Fredville in Kent and Bowthorpe in Lincolnshire are of comparable girth.
Golden Grove witnessed the clamour of Glyndwr’s army passing by in July, 1403, and smelled the smoke of Llandilo and Carmarthen towns in flames. Did Oliver Cromwell’s deer, gifted to the Countess Carberry following his Civil War visit to the old Gelli Aur, nibble the oak’s leaves? Did Jeremy Taylor whisper heavenly sermons in its shade?
The Vaughans of Golden Grove had a tradition dating back to Sir William Vaughan, author, scholar and Newfoundland colonialist, who in 1608 advocated systematic tree husbandry. Each tenancy agreement contained a clause that required the planting of so many oak and ash saplings, provided by the estate, every year. The result of that sound policy evidently influenced landowners all over the county and is visible today. Survivors of contemporary and later plantings stand sentinel from Ystradffin to Llanstephan, living monuments and selfless gifts to future generations – to us and ours, provided we continue to care for them.
Dynevor Park contains some of the finest specimen oak and other native broadleaved trees, meticulously catalogued in Lord Dynevor’s 1935 book The Trees of Dynevor Castle. Curiously, he does not mention the famous King’s Oak, which I remember as a boy. A callous in the bark at shoulder height struck a facial likeness of George V.
These are all quercus robur, otherwise English or pedunculate oak. But Carmarthenshire is endowed with another native oak variety – the sessile oak (quercus petraea). Of primal origin and a dwarf species by comparison, its occurrence is dominant in those ‘hanging woodlands’, particularly precious examples of which grace the Gwili and Teifi valleys, the vale of Cothi at Cwrt-y-cadno and the upper Towy region. They are a characteristic feature of the county and very likely were just like that in Roman times and when Twm Siôn Cati was a rogue abroad.
Of course, the most famous Carmarthenshire oak is the Joker in the pack. Frank Hennessy has a sweet song about it, Merlin the magician a bogus prophesy and Carmarthen Museum splinter of it in a case. I refer, as you know, to the Old (Carmarthen) Oak, sometimes known as Merlin’s Oak. It was no such thing, anymore than Merlin. It was planted on the 19th of May, 1659 by a Mr Adams, a master at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School to mark the proclamation of Charles 11, who had been some while in exile. A local shopkeeper poisoned it in the early 19th century for being an annoyance, since it attracted congregations of pre-Victorian hoodies.
Something of an amateur dendrologist, I enjoy looking at and discovering special trees. There are so many splendid examples in our county, apart from the oaks. May I invite you on a future outing when we’ll encounter some more of these venerable living monuments? Some of them in churchyards: and I can’t think of a better starting-point than Llandybie.
Till then.
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