Help map our ancient trees

The woodland trust need your help to find out where all Britain's ancient trees are. The National Parks contain lots of ancient trees and we know where some of them are, but not all of them. All you need to help is a map and a hug.

Ancient trees are big, fat and special

An ancient tree is one that makes you go ‘wow, it’s huge, fatter than any other tree like thatround here’. It will be really fat, but probably  not that tall, as really old trees start to shrinkdown. Like people, trees grow and age at different rates depending on where they are and what happens to them during their lifetime. But here’s a rough guide as to when trees start to be of interest to the Ancient Tree Hunt, based on our hug method of measurement:

• Oak - 3 hugs
• Beech - 2 hugs
• Sweet chestnut - 4 hugs
• Ash - 2 hugs
• Scots pine - 2 hugs
• Birch - 1 hug
• Hawthorn - 1 hug
• Field maple - 1 hug

An ancient oak tree is usually at least 400 years old, and can be over a 1000 years old!

Ancient trees are full of holes and dead and rotting wood. As the years go by they provide the perfect homes for thousands of species of plants, animals, insects and fungi, including many rare and threatened species. Clusters of ancient trees are even more important because together all the trees will offer a really wide range of nooks and crannies, providing homes for lots of different specialist species in just one small area.

How to record a tree - give it a hug

If you have a tape measure, wrap it around the tree trunk at its narrowest point, normally about 1.5m up from the ground. If you take a picture you can add it to the ancient tree hunt website.

If you don't have anything to measure with, just hug the tree. An adult hug (arms outstreched as far as possible) is 1.5m on average. So count how many hugs it takes to surround the tree and you have fairly good measure of how wide it is.