The Cowarne Court Oak – a great lost tree of Herefordshire

Several years ago I was looking into the whereabouts of some of Herefordshire’s big trees and turned to the history books. The Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club, established in 1851, brought together the county’s botanists, ornithologists, palaeontologists, mycologists, et al; all of whom loved nothing better than getting together and rambling hither and yon across the county and its immediate neighbours. As they rambled they took copious notes so that accounts of their treks could be recorded in the Society’s journals. As you’d expect with lengthy Victorian diatribes, much of the written legacy is pretty turgid, and some of the opinions can be oddball or simply inaccurate in the light of our knowledge today. However, they did make valuable records of plants, which 150 years on have long disappeared from our countryside. During the 1860s and 70s they also took the time and trouble to make very detailed records of Herefordshire’s remarkable trees.
Trees were always carefully measured and a description of the trees character and health set down. Some trees were illustrated with wood engravings interpreted from members’ sketches while later on the firm of Ladmore & Son were commissioned to take photographs – the actual albumen prints later being tipped into the yearbooks (must have been incredibly fiddly and time consuming process). As often as not a couple of top-hatted club members pose beneath some mighty tree or a little knot of local folk lounge decorously about the base of the bole to bring a sense of scale.
The more I studied the books the more compelled I was to see how many of these trees were still with us. Obviously the humungous King’s Acre Elm, on the Brecon Road out of Hereford, which stood 95’ high & had a girth of almost 19’, is long gone, but I thought there could be fair a chance that the yews and some of the oaks could still be intact.
Perhaps the closest tree to where I live was the Cowarne Court Oak, near Much Cowarne. The old house of Cowarne Court is long gone, and the site where it once stood is little more than a sad tangle of neglected woodland, but I wondered if the oak tree had managed to survive. Since this is now private land I had to ask permission, but the local farmer reckoned that the tree had fallen and that its remains currently lay in a ditch not far from a rather dilapidated medieval dovecote.
I walked down the field margin until I came across the sad spectre of the great old tree lying, half hidden by undergrowth in said ditch. It’s always a bit sobering to find a once stupendous tree which, judging by its recorded girth of over 37’ in 1870, must have been at least 800 years old now reduced to a pile of rotting timber. Okay, so it will be brilliant habitat for invertebrates – all part of its place in the great cycle of life, but as I searched about for some small relic of this departing monster I kicked over this strange shard and, the more I looked at it, I began to see something quite strange. See what you make of it!