The Copper Beech by the South Pond, Groeneveld

At 5.28 metres around, this is the thickest beech on the Groeneveld estate, and the number comes with an asterisk. It was measured a metre off the ground rather than at the standard 1.3 metres, almost certainly because something at chest height, a low limb or a spreading buttress, made the usual spot unmeasurable. So it is not directly comparable to the estate's other big beeches, which run from 4.00 to 5.05 metres taken properly. It is still the largest of them by a wide margin. Nobody recorded when it went in, so the age above is inferred from its girth and from what was happening around it. Groeneveld's grounds were first laid out in Dutch Baroque geometry and then loosened into English landscape style through the nineteenth century, particularly after 1830, and a solitary copper beech placed for effect beside water is exactly that fashion. An open-grown beech this thick is usually put somewhere between 150 and 200 years old, which is a range and not a date. Most of the estate's beeches stand together in a copse west of the castle, competing and drawn up thin. This one has stood alone by the southernmost pond, which is why it carries the low, wide frame it does, roughly 27 metres tall and spreading. With the leaves down, that frame is the reason to walk out here in January.