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12 The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland
forms the timber line, it would be remarkable if the beech had not in early days
gained a footing in Scotland and Ireland. The mere negative evidence is of little
value, as scarcely any scientific work has yet been done in the way of exploration of
the peat-mosses and other recent deposits ; and the woods, from which are made the
handles of numerous prehistoric implements preserved in our museums, have rarely
been examined. 1
The beech occurs in a wild state throughout the greater part of Northern,
Central, and Western Europe, usually growing gregariously in forests which, when
undisturbed by man, have a tendency to spread and take the place of oak, which,
owing to its inability to support such dense shade, is often suppressed by the beech.
In Norway, according to Schubeler, 2 it is called bok, and is wild only near
Laurvik, where he believes it to be truly indigenous, and is a small tree, the
largest he measured being 7 feet 4 inches in girth. At Hosanger, however,
a planted beech had in 1864 attained 75 feet at 81 years old, with a diameter of
27 inches. It ripens seed as far north as Trondhjem in good years, and exists in
Nordland as far north as lat. 67 .56.
In Sweden its most northerly wild habitat is Elfkalven, lat. 60 .35, though
it has been planted as far north as lat. 64 .
In Russia the beech extends only a little way, its eastern limit in Europe
passing the Prussian coast of the Baltic between Elbing and Konigsberg, about 54 30'
N. lat, and running south from Konigsberg, where the last spontaneous beeches
occur on the Brandenburg estate, continuing through Lithuania, eastern Poland,
Volhynia, where beech woods still occur between lat. 52 and 50 , and Podolia to
Bessarabia. It is absent from the governments of Kief and Kherson, but re
appears in the Crimea, where, however, it is only met with in the mountains of the
south-east coast. In the Caucasus, Persia, and Asia Minor it is replaced by the
closely allied species, Fagus orientalis.
In Finland and at St. Petersburg it exists as a bush only, but is not wild.
On the southern shores of the Baltic it forms large forests, and in Denmark is
one of the most abundant and valuable timber trees, growing to as large a size
and forming as clean trunks as it does farther south. Lyell speaks of it as
follows : 8 " In the time of the Romans the Danish isles were covered as now with
magnificent beech forests. Nowhere in the world does this tree flourish more
luxuriantly than in Denmark, and eighteen centuries seem to have done little or
nothing towards modifying the character of the forest vegetation. Yet in the
antecedent bronze period there were no beech trees, or at most but a few stragglers,
the country being then covered with oak."
At page 415 he says further " In Denmark great changes were taking place in
the vegetation. The pine, or Scotch fir, buried in the oldest peat, gave place at
length to the oak ; and the oak, after flourishing for ages, yielded in its turn to the
1 In a paper by H. B. Watt on the " Scottish Forests in Early Historic Times," printed in Annals of the Andersonian
Nat. Sac. ii. 91, Glasg., 1900, which contains many interesting particulars of the oak and other trees, no mention is made
of the Beech. In the Highland Society's Gaelic Dictionary ( 1828), faidhbhile is given as the word for beech; here fafdA is
cognate \i\\hfagus, bhile being one of the Gaelic terms for tree. This name is also known in Ulster.
2 Schubeler, Viridarium Norvegicum, vol. i. 521. 3 Lyell, Antiquity of Man, 2nd. ed. 1873, PP- ^7. 4'5-
Fagus
beech ; the periods when these three forest trees predominated in succession tallying
pretty nearly with the ages of stone, bronze, and iron in Denmark."
All over Germany, except in the sandy plains of the north, it is one of the
principal forest trees; but, so far as we have seen, does not or is rarely allowed to
attain such a great size as in England. In Central and Southern Germany and in
Eastern and Southern France it seems to be indigenous only in hilly districts and
mountains.
In the north of France it attains perfection, and forms very large forests, usually
mixed with oak, which sometimes contain trees of immense height, but is not planted
as an ornament to parks as much as in England.
According to Huffel's Economic Forestiere, 362 (1904), the finest beech forest in
France is that of Retz, also called Villers Cotterets, which contains 37,000 acres, on
a soil composed of deep sand, mixed with a slight proportion of clay. The trees
consist almost entirely of beeches, there being only a small number of oaks and
hornbeams. In the best plot of this forest, the canton of Dayancourt, which is 30
acres in extent, there were, in 1895, 1998 beech trees, 20 oaks, and 16 hornbeams.
The beeches contain 329,433 cubic feet of timber, and reach a height of nearly 150 feet
with clean stems of 80 to 90 feet. Their age in 1895 was 183 years, and they were
considered to have reached their maximum development and to be on the point of
going back.
In an account of the beech, Mr. Robinson has stated in Flora and Sylva that in
the forest of Lyons-la-Foret, near Rouen, beeches of 160 feet in height are found ;
but on asking my friend M. Leon Parde, inspector of forests at Beauvais (Oise), near
Paris, whether this statement could be confirmed, he was good enough to send me a
letter from the forest officer there, who says that the tallest beech known in France
is the one which I saw in the Foret de Retz, when the English Arboricultural Society
visited France in I9O3, 1 the height of which was given as 45 metres, about 147 feet.
This tree measured 13 feet 2 inches in girth, and was straight and clear of branches
to 91 feet. It was estimated by the English measurement to contain 560 cubic feet
to the first branch, or 700 feet in all. This letter goes on to say that the tallest trees
at Lyons-le-Foret do not, in his opinion, exceed a total height of 35 metres, though
one has doubtfully been stated to attain 37^ metres.
Two of the finest and tallest beeches in France are the one called " La
Bourdigalle" in the Foret de Lyons at La Haye (Seine Inf.), which is 35.80 metres
high by 5.55 metres at i metre, and is supposed to be from 375 to 575 years old. 2
Another called " Le Trois Hetres," in the forest of Brotonne at Guerbaville
(Seine Inf.), has three straight clean stems rising from a single base to a height of
nearly 35 metres, with a girth at i metre of about 18 feet. This very remarkable
tree is figured on plate xi. of the work cited below.2
In Switzerland pure beech forest is found as high as 4500 feet, and at 5000
assumes a shrubby habit.
In the Austrian Alps and Carpathians it is also a common tree, forming vast
forests, which are sometimes pure, sometimes mixed with other trees.
1 Trails. Eng. Art. Soc. v . pt. ii. p. 209. 2 Gadeau de Kerville, Les Vieux Arbres de la Normandie, 1 43 (1893).