The Pollarded Planes of the Corralillos del Gas

These two planes outlasted the farmland they were cut for. They stand inside a stone enclosure near the roundabout that faces the Curtidores bridge, a pair of pollards that Pamplona's 2010 book of old and singular trees calls born survivors of the recent urbanisation of the Rochapea. The Rochapea, on the flat north bank of the Arga, was a farming district until not long ago. Pollarding belongs to that world. A tree is cut back well above the ground and the regrowth is harvested again and again, for firewood, poles or leaves for the animals, and over the years the trunk thickens beneath a crown of younger branches. The book measured these at 7.1 metres round at chest height, 15 metres tall and 20 metres across the crown. It also records that the trunk forks from the base, so that girth may well take in more than one stem. Either way, size is half of why they are in the book. The other half is that nothing else like them stands anywhere around. They are not quite alone in remembering the fields. About 80 metres away, a walnut in what is now a car park at the same spot, the Corralillos del gas, is in the book as one of the last witnesses of the market gardens. Nobody has dated the planes. If you know when they were first cut, tell us.