From rq, who says, It’s an old property with old, old trees on it. The first two photos are the same tree from different angles. A lot of the trees had similar sort of burn marks on them, I don’t know if it’s human activity or lightning strikes, it was rather odd. Nobody’s lived there for 20 years, since the original house burnt down back in the 1990s. But the trees are still there.
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© rq, all rights reserved.
And we’Re back to our gothic novel, I think
Spirits and ghosts living in the trees. There’s one that’s my favourite, photos of it should be up in a day or so, definitely story-worthy.
They look look they’ve been “pollarded”, sometime in the past. Some trees can be harvested multiple times using this technique. These don’t look like anyone has cared for them after the last cut.
That tree looks like one of the apple trees in my orchard -- it has that same hollow on one side. (My trees are all very old, perhaps as much as 100 years old.) My tree has a regular fruiting of Pleurutus ostreatus, common name “Oyster mushroom”, and I would suspect that this tree as well has some sort of fungi fruiting on it at some time or other.
@Lofty: I will look up “pollarding” because maybe that’s why my tree looks like that too…
Lofty
You may be right about that, it’s a common enough pruning technique here on more than just apple trees. And these ones haven’t been tended for 20+ years. I’ll be going back during leafy time and see what kind of a tree it is, because in its current state, I couldn’t guess -- I thought some willow type, but it could be a really ancient apple tree.