The Beech of the Hunting Wood

The wood this beech stands in is a leftover piece of the hunting ground of the lords of Helmont, and the register knows what the farmhands used to eat in it. The pool here is called the spekstreuvelvenneke and it has always been there. The name comes from what happened around it: farm workers took their midday meal at this spot, and what they ate was spekstruif, a bacon pancake. That is the level of detail a national tree register does not usually carry, and it survives because somebody local made sure it did. The wood shows on a map of 1890. It is a relict, a fragment of a much older hunting landscape that the farming and building around it never quite absorbed. The beech, banded 1870 to 1880, is a purple one, which in a fragment of old hunting wood is an incomer: somebody planted it deliberately in a place that had otherwise simply been left. Go in October, when it turns copper, and find the pool. The pancake is not provided.