Burnham Beeches, Buckinghamshire
The Beeches, covering 220 hectares, is famous for its ancient beech and oak pollards and the range of flora and fauna associated with old trees and decaying wood.
Much of Burnham Beeches was once wood pasture. Cut in the past for wood fuel for local use, the site’s pollarded trees were abandoned approximately 200 years ago, resulting in very heavy branches on fragile stems. Many of the estimated 3,000 original trees have been lost as they have fallen over or fallen apart so now only around 420 remain. The City of London is working to re-establish the ancient techniques and restoring the old, lapsed pollards, as well as finding out new methods to create new pollards to help bridge the gap with the veterans.
>> Article on the Cage Pollard at Burnham Beeches, first published in Pro Arb magazine
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