Sub tegmine fagi

Seen today: a massive beech tree that I  reckoned must be around three centuries old. Its circumference, roughly measured with a piece of string, came to over 16 feet for which  an online tree age calculator suggests an age of 286 years - probably an underestimate because the girth of the trunk should have been measured  slightly higher up.

Anyway, the tree was too big to make a single image of so I've tried to stitch two together, not completely successfully but I think it gives an idea of the magnitude of this giant.

On a personal note, my earliest education took place under a beech tree. As a very small child I used to walk with my father to a woodland he called sub tegmine fagi. With his classical education it came naturally to him to employ a line from Virgil's Eclogues meaning  "under the cover of a beech tree"  while I in my ignorance just took the name for granted, along with the Welsh ones. My father sat and smoked his pipe while I made houses for imaginary zoo animals from the flat stones that lay around, and practised writing the letters of the alphabet in spit on his wellies.