Evergreen

44 EVERGREEN Autumn
Leigh Woods is a 500-acre
wilderness of tranquillity on
the edge of Bristol overlooking
Brunel’s famous suspension bridge.
Tor Stanfield, area ranger for the
National Trust for the past 14 years,
was tasked in 2016-17 to manage a
comprehensive survey of ancient and
veteran oak trees.
The majority are
in Leigh Woods
but she also
surveyed those
on other National
Trust woodland sites in and around
Bristol, including the Tyntesfield
Estate, where beech, sweet chestnut
and hybrids proliferate alongside the
oak trees.
The £25,000 project required Tor
to inspect every tree in a portfolio of
1,000 ancient and veteran trees on the
various woodland sites. She worked
from early morning to late afternoon
five days a week last summer,
completing most of the inspections
and recording data by early autumn.
She’s now writing a 10-year
tree management plan for the
National Trust for their ancient
and veteran trees in the area. She
says: “Previously the different
National Trust sites had individual
management plans. Now we’ll have
one plan covering all ancient and
veteran trees.”
Ancient trees are those that are
very old for their species: some over
600 years old in the case of oak trees.
The veterans at
Leigh Woods are
If you go down to around 400–500
the woods today
years old and
the predominant
species are sessile
and pedunculate oak.
As part of the project 12
trees were cored: the resulting
dendrochronology report will give
a more accurate age to the trees and
provide information such as when
pollarding and grazing stopped in
Leigh Woods.
“Ancient trees might have rot
holes on the trunk or they may be
hollow in the middle. They’re likely
to have missing branches and lots
of dead wood, which makes them a
fantastic habitat for invertebrates or
in layman’s terms... bugs, plus birds
and even bats. Veteran trees tend to
have the same features.