Yesterday we set off on our second ancient tree quest in the direction of Newport and Tredegar House. We were looking for a broad avenue of oak pollards, laid out shortly after 1664 in the old deer park, part of the Tredegar estate owned by the Morgan family for 600 years and now managed by the National Trust on a 50 year lease from Newport City Council. In their ownership it was once described as 'the grandest council house in Britain.'
We hoped we'd be more successful than our first search in Aberthaw. An avenue of pollarded trees should be easy to spot we thought, but in 90 acres of garden and parkland, who knows? Pollarding is a pruning system in which the upper branches of a tree are removed, promoting a dense head of foliage and branches. It has been common in Europe since medieval times.Traditionally, trees were pollarded for fodder to feed livestock or for wood. Pollarded trees tend to live longer than the unpollarded as they do not have the weight and windage of the top part of the tree. Older pollards often become hollow, so can be difficult to age accurately.
I'm discovering that when you set off on a quest you don't necessarily find what you are originally looking for. Sometimes you bump into something else more interesting to surprise you. So it was when we entered the Cedar Garden and were confronted by a magnificent
Cedar of Lebanon, its leafy arms outstretched giving cover and shade to Sir Briggs buried in its shadow. Sir Briggs was the steed of Godfrey Morgan, First Viscount Tredegar. Both fought in the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854. Alongside were the graves of three family dogs. All framed by magnolias and herbaceous borders of tulips and hyacinths,whose sweet perfume perfaded, lifting the chilly Sunday afternoon.
At the end of the 18th century the Morgan family had originally owned 40,000 acres in Monmouthshire, Breconshire and Glamorgan. The last Viscount of Tredegar, Evan Morgan,kept wild animals inside as well outside the House, including a boxing kangeroo and a flock of birds that according to Phil Carradice on his BBC Wales blog, did his bidding. He was known as,'The Black Monk,' being an expert in the occult and even built himself a 'magik' room,where he performed rituals. He was a high ranking officer in MI8 in WW2, responsible for monitoring racing pigeons. After a court martial for leaking secrets, he put a curse on his CO, who later contacted a mysterious illness and nearly died.
So I wondered as we came on the broad avenue of oaks,what memories and secrets were they hiding in their hollowed trunks and in the pores of their scarred rhino skins.As we walked among them, flat palms on rough bark, Black-headed Crows danced on the grass around us. We counted more than twenty-five oaks on each side of the avenue that led back to the grand entrance of the red-bricked House. I saw gold and black carriages carrying gentry in procession towards licentiousness. The trees' hollows became vulvas and arse holes mocking them en route. In my weird imagination of course.
Ahead of us,the M4 cut across what would have been the continuation of the deer park. We could see the avenue continuing up the hill on the other side of the motor way, its marine roar bringing us back to the Twenty-first Century with a jolt.
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