On 23rd December 1891 the forester John Malcolm Forbes completed a report of his survey of the woodlands and plantations of the Lilleshall Estate. This is preserved in Shropshire Archives as item 972/3/17/3, “Report on the Woods and Plantations on the Lilleshall Estate 1891”. Forbes gave his address as Farnham Royal, Slough, Buckinghamshire. Presumably he was brought in as a respected forester with no connection to the estate to give an objective assessment of the woodlands’ condition.
The report lists 63 woodlands and plantations, with a paragraph for each outline the tree species present, the general condition of the wood, and recommendations about future management. These are being reproduced on the entries in the Woodlands and Plantations section of this website.
At the end of the report, Forbes provided the following summary:
Concluding Remarks
The most prominent feature in the Woods in the Lilleshall district is the almost total absence of timber ranging between the ages of sixty years and one hundred and twenty years and upwards. While a large quantity of old timber requires felling, the retention of a moderate quantity would enable estate demands to be met until the (at-present) young woods become fellable.
John Forbes appeared in the 1891 census at Carton Villa, Spring Lane, Farnham Royal, Eton, Buckinghamshire, as a 58 year old widower. His occupation was described as “Land Agent”. Living with him was his 24 year old son A.C. Forbes, a “Forester”. Arthur Charles Forbes went on to have an impressive career in forestry, as a lecturer at Armstrong College the precursor to the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, moving Ireland in 1905, and eventually becoming Ireland’s first Director of Forestry. Father and son are mentioned in a study tour of Burnham Beeches near Farnham in the Transactions of the Royal Scottish Arboricultural Society, 1895, XIV. Burnham Beeches was a 374 acre woodland which had been bought by the Corporation of London in 1879 and was open to the public.
The company then, under the direction of Mr John Forbes, the custodian of the place, drove along many of the most charming of the grassy rides which intersect the grounds, and saw on the way the most of the curious old pollarded beeches, which are supposed to be from five hundred to seven hundred years of age. A line or two from Mr A. C. Forbes’s little book on the Beeches will better explain their characteristic features than any amount of description by a stranger :— “The beech trees, which render the place so justly famous, are distributed pretty evenly over the whole of the forest. They owe their present unique and picturesque appearance to their having been subjected at some distant period to the operation of pollarding, or lopping off the tops at about 10 feet from the ground, which was done for the sake of the timber so obtained.”
Arthur’s book is likely to be his 1898 “Guide to Burnham Beeches” which he wrote for the visiting public.