You may have come across some very odd-shaped trees around the hills in the vicinity of Killarney and even down at Parknasilla. Trees - mostly, but not all, oak - which seem to scramble along the mountainside like a crab rather than reach up to the sky. Some may have been blown down in the wind or, otherwise, stood in poor soil. Here and there the fallen trees have rooted from their twigs and branches and may have a long life. Francis Kilvert tells us in his diary for April 1876 of a joyous romp in a famous wood in Herefortshire, Moccas Park, now a National Nature Reserve.
He tells of slipping and sliding down the steep hillside, passing, in the dusk, what seemed to be a great ruined grey tower, but which proved to be "the vast ruin of the big king oak of Moccas Park, hollow and broken but still alive and vigorous in parts and actually pushing out new shoots and branches. The tree may be 2000 years old . . . I fear those grey old men of Moccas, those grey, gnarled, low-browed, knock-kneed, bowed, bent huge, strange, long-armed, deformed, hunch-backed misshapen oak men that stand waiting and watching century after century, biding God's time with both feet in the grave and yet tiring down and seeing out generation after generation . . . No human hand set those oaks. They are `the trees which the Lord hath planted.' They look as if they had been at the beginning and making of the world, and they will probably see its end."
The Rev Francis Kilvert's diary is a nice patchwork of gossip and observation, but his description of Moccas Park in his day has been described by Richard Mabey, himself an author of note, as "the most graphic account we have of the feel of ancient wood pasture." Indeed, it's a wonderful piece and it was a pity that another distinguished writer on trees had to disillusion us, remarking that "our great wildwoods' passed away in prehistory and even if we accept Kilvert's speculation that the `king oak' of Moccas (now sadly gone) was 2,000 years old, the link between this tree and the wildwood - the plantings of the Lord - is tenuous."
Yet he admits that "Kilvert's perceptive account should help to give us heart that there is indeed a surprising degree of vigour left in many of the old trees and they look set fair to stand waiting and watching, tiring us down and seeing us out for a good while yet." More, another day, about ancient tree oddities. Y