Not very far from Carrbridge, in the Grampians, is one of the strangest and weirdest bits of pine forest it is possible to imagine. Here the trees have plenty of room to spread; they evidently owe their existence to birds that have brought the seeds from afar. Be that as it may, they are not very tall, but gnarled and branched in the most fantastic fashion, while in the open spaces between them grow heather and brackens of such height and magnificence that among them an army could hide. If fairies still dwell anywhere in this land of ours, surely it is in this weirdlike ferny forest of Alpine pine-trees.
I very greatly enjoyed my long drive through Sherwood Forest, on the Duke of Portland’s estate. There, I think, many of the oaks are even more aged than those in the New Forest here, though, perhaps, I am mistaken. Spenser’s lines would better therefore describe the former—
“Great oaks, dry and dead,
Still clad with relics of their trophies old,
Lifting to heaven their aged hoary heads,
Whose feet on earth have got but feeble hold,
And half disbowelled stand above the ground,
With wreathed roots and naked arms,
And trunks all rotten and unsound.”
In one of our rambles through the New Forest—driven we were in a dogcart over the green sward, through the ferns and through the furze, over glades and natural lawns, into tree caves, and round and about the gigantic monarchs of the woods—we were taken by our guide to see the king and queen oaks, a morsel of the bark of each of which now lies in the caravan. I would not like even to guess how old these oaks were—probably a thousand years and more. Yet had you and I, reader, a chance of living as long as these majestic trees may still exist, it would not be profitable for an assurance company to grant us an annuity.
But before seeing the king and queen I pointed out to our guide one particular oak.
“What a splendid old oak!” I remarked.
“Old,” was the reply—“why, sir, that’s only a hinfant hoak. He ain’t mebbe more’n three or four ’undred year old.”
And this was an infant!
I was silent for a spell after that. I was thinking.
’Twixt three and four hundred years of age! My mind was carried away back to the days of Henry the Eighth. He would be on the throne about that time, if I remember my school history aright, marrying and giving in marriage, cutting off heads right and left, and making himself generally jolly; and Cardinal Wolsey was up and about, and poor Buckingham was murdered under guise of an execution; and on the whole they were very busy and very bloody times, when this “hinfant hoak” first popped out of its acorn.