Ancient woodland

No apologies for more Autumn colour - I spend all year looking forward to this brief blaze and am making the most of it.  The sun came out at sunset, complete with rainbow as it hadn't stopped raining, and I took a shot of this giant beech.

We live in a clearing in an ancient woodland.  That doesn't mean that all the trees are ancient (although this one could be 200 years old).  It means that it has been a woodland continuously since at least 1600AD.  You can tell ancient woodlands as they have drifts of Bluebells, which take hundreds of years to spread, and the same with Wild Garlic.  And they have signs of man's activity like saw and charcoal pits, and holloways carved out by feet, hooves and cartwheels.  These woodlands are full of man-made lumps and bumps and tracks.

This tree is huge at its base.  Its trunk has obviously been cut down to a height of about 6 feet once or several times, but probably not since the commercial value of the wood fell after the Second World War.  This is how its value was maximised with the new wood being cut every few years.  It also rejuvenated the tree which can live for hundreds of years if managed this way.  The wood was used for firewood, charcoal, fencing, building timber and furniture, particularly chairs.  The wonderfully named "bodgers" used to turn branches into chair legs.