Heritage Trail - Riverside Plantations

A stand of pre-war beeches dominate the tree planting.	Recent tidying work. Parish Councillor Terry Gaussen organises a weekly team of local volunteers who manage the riverside. Helpers are always welcome.

The steep riverside slopes were used for managed plantations in the C18th and possibly earlier, providing a range of valuable woodland resources.

This lime is one of the best examples we have found in our area of an ancient lapsed coppice ring, possibly dating from late medieval times. It is in Hatfield Bank woodland, on the riverside near Wray Wood, just inside the NE parish boundary of Boston Spa.

Hatfield Bank and the then much larger Wray Wood once provided an important area of ancient and managed woodland for the medieval Township of Clifford. Incredibly the plant in the photograph now has nine large trunks growing from its one base or ‘stool’. This means that it must have been repeatedly coppiced for a very long time, so that the stool grew wider and wider, until coppicing lapsed and it grew away into a huge multi-stemmed tree. Here we are measuring and recording it, along with other veteran and coppice trees in the surviving woodland.