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Updated: May 26, 2025
In those days, and till comparatively recent times, the country was densely wooded. Even now, traces of its earlier condition are to be found in the old oak copses and irregular belts of timber that yet survive upon its slopes, and the hollow-trunked trees that shade so many of its pastures. The forests have departed, but some old customs of their shades remain.
But further on it spreads itself out again and becomes calm and peaceful. But what always attracts attention is a peninsula of forest projecting into this sea of cultivated land. There can be found hollow-trunked trees, a century old, trees which die only when struck by lightning and set on fire. They say, also, that even in that case the fire never spreads to any other tree.
And being thus out of the immediate patronage of fashion, the great piece of water really looked natural, companionable, refreshing: you began to breathe; to unbutton your waistcoat, loosen your neckeloth, quote Chaucer, if you could recollect him, or Cowper, or Shakspeare, or Thomson's "Seasons;" in short, any scraps of verse that came into your head, as your feet grew joyously entangled with fern; as the trees grouped forest-like before and round you; trees which there, being out of sight, were allowed to grow too old to be worth five shillings a piece, moss-grown, hollow-trunked, some pollarded, trees invaluable!
Here you may see, shouldering above the irregular copse, the bulk of some primeval oak, gnarled and hollow-trunked, spared partly because it would afford no timber worth cutting, and partly, we may hope, from some tender sense of beauty and veneration which even now, by a hint of instinctive tradition haunting the rustic mind, attends the ancient tree and surrounds it with a sense of respect too dim to be called a memory even of forgotten things.
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