These are pollard riches unmatched in the UK, and they are only half an hour on the overground train from the City of London. Conservation by careful use, not the lack of it.Įpping Forest is home to 55,000 ancient pollards: 10,000 oak, 20,000 beech, 25,000 hornbeam. Pollarding struck me as a beautiful thing, humankind and nature gaining strength from each other. The result is, in effect, a clutch of 200-year-old trees growing from one 800-year-old trunk. Done sparingly, it exposes dormant buds, encouraging new growth. This is the product of pollarding, trimming the tops of trees for wood, a commoner practice here for centuries. Around head height, the snub trunk bulges in a bole, from which a handful of smaller, strong, smooth trunks reach up and branch out in subtle angles. In fact its ugliness explains its longevity. Epping Forest’s unmatched riches are only half an hour on the train from the City of London It has tickled the horses of medieval kings, survived centuries of storms, seen off war and pestilence, and remained rooted here in this soil. This one is 800 years old, he says, blue eyes shining. Beeches normally last 300 years before they conk out and topple over. Jeremy stops abruptly by an ugly, gnarled thing, and traces his hands across its snakeskin bark. Everyone just needs a good ending to a story right now.An 800-year-old beech pollard in the forest. It will make so many people happy if she’s found. Somehow this little lost dog seems to have found its way into people’s hearts. “We’re living through such a rubbish time with Covid, and bleak news everywhere you go. What keeps her going is the support and “incredible” acts of kindness she has received from strangers and fellow dog owners all over the world, particularly in the sighthound community, and she is very grateful for the help of the Epping Forest wardens. The house looks like a bomb’s gone off, and normal life has just gone out the window.” “We are tag-teaming being out in the forest every day and night. “We think that any active searching is pushing her away.”īetween them, she and her husband, Nick, spend 10 to 12 hours in the forest every day, replenishing the food stations and hoping that Cookie will recognise them, all while trying to hold down their jobs and home-school their young children. “He was really useful in being able to confirm some of her routes, and some of the sightings that were a little hazy.”īut, she adds, he’s “off the case” now. So she is somehow surviving.”įreeman takes hope from the fact that Harvey found fresh scent of Cookie close to where the whippet was recently sighted. She’s young, fit and strong, and she has a naturally high prey drive. “If she’d been a cockapoo or a smaller dog, there’s no way she would have survived eight weeks. She and an army of volunteers are also roasting chickens to put in food stations around the forest twice a day, in the hope of luring Cookie into a regular routine so that she can be trapped. This enabled Freeman to hire a K9 tracker dog – a cocker spaniel called Harvey who specialises in finding lost dogs – to look for Cookie, as well as a thermal drone and a professional trapper. She’s basically living like a fox, and hiding from people because she thinks everyone’s a predator.”ĭog lovers such as Lott, Rani, Saunders, Mark Wright and Freeman’s MP, Stella Creasy, have all shared posts on social media about the missing dog, and a crowdfunding campaign to bring Cookie home has raised more than £6,000. “She was terrified – and she quite quickly went into this deep survival mode. She thinks her whippet, who has nearly 8,500 followers on Instagram, went “wild” after being chased that evening by a well-intentioned member of the public who was trying to capture her. Cookie the whippet with four-year-old Nancy, owner Leonie Freeman’s daughter.
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