Dear Readers, today I went  to Epping Forest in Essex with my friend L. What an extraordinary place this is! I’m much more familiar with the hornbeam  and oak forest in North London, whereas Epping features some truly impressive beech trees, such as those in the photo above. There are places in  the forest that feel almost uncanny, and if you look closely there are a lot of faces in some of the trees. Maybe Ents (from Lord of the Rings) are real after all…

We used to go to Epping Forest as children – it was a quick-ish trip from our house in Stratford, and although our Ford Popular car used to overheat in traffic and struggled with hills (in spite of being called ‘Thunderball’) it was always an adventure.

We arrived at Broadstrood, and almost immediately found this fallen tree.

It looks as if one tree fell, bringing the other one down with it.

Bracket fungi always orientate themselves horizontally to the ground (so that their spores can fall downwards) – if you look at the one below, you can see how the growth on the right occurred when the tree was vertical, but the fungus has continued to grow since the tree fell, realigning itself to the ground on the left.

The little brown spots on the tree are holes where beetles, possibly ambrosia beetles, have been hard at work.

As I’ve mentioned previously, it’s always interesting to look at a tree and try to work out what’s going on with it. Sometimes, as here, you have a live tree (an oak) growing in the remains of an old, dead tree.

Some of these trees were pollarded in the past (cut back every thirteen years or so, to a height above the head of grazing animals) but this stopped after the Epping Forest Act of 1878, so some of the trees have a most unusual appearance.

In one or two places they seem to have grown  in a line, as below – were they originally planted as hedging, but then allowed to grow unhindered?

Epping Forest is a truly magnificent wood, the largest forest in London, and still home to fallow deer, adders and a fine array of birds, including a treecreeper that I spotted half way up a beech tree. It’s a great spot for a walk amongst some of the most magnificent trees in London.