Storm topples storied 120-year-old copper beech tree at Westport House

The storm took it in the night. By the time the wind dropped last weekend, the great copper beech beside the Italianate garden at the back of Westport House lay on its side, and the old order of the grounds had changed. Of the four copper beeches planted on the estate in 1905, only two are now left standing.

They were put in the ground on October 25, 1905, to mark a Golden Wedding. The couple was Henry Ulick Browne, 5th Marquess of Sligo (1831-1913), and his wife, Lady Catherine Henrietta Browne, née Dicken (1836-1914), the Marchioness of Sligo. Fifty years of marriage deserved something that would last, and a tree that can live for centuries was a fitting choice.

The Marchioness left her own account of the occasion, and it gives a vivid picture of Westport at the height of its Edwardian pomp. The couple had been at Westport “some time since my husband succeeded to the Marquisate,” she wrote. “We had a large house-party for the occasion and were fourteen to lunch that day, and we received a great many presents from friends and relatives - our eight surviving children giving us a large, two-handled, silver-gilded cup.”

Her words also show how big a household Westport was. As part of the celebrations, a supper and dance was held for the 130 employees of the house, a figure that says much about the scale of the establishment and the army of people needed to keep it running.

Her account is also a reminder of the upstairs-downstairs world of the time. The family’s friends were invited to an afternoon party first. A few days later, the servants were allowed to invite their own friends, so that, in the Marchioness’s telling, everyone was féted. It was perhaps generous by the standards of the day, though the two parties were kept separate.

The beeches have outlived nearly everyone and everything connected with that celebration. The sprawling 400-acre estate has long been famous for its magnificent, ancient trees, and copper beeches (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) are prominent among them. Over the years, some of these giants have fallen naturally or been carefully managed because of age.

Copper beech, also known as purple beech, is a cultivated form of the common beech, though copper-coloured trees are occasionally found in the wild. It can top 40 metres. The bark is smooth, thin and grey, often with faint horizontal etchings, and the slender grey twigs zig-zag rather than run straight. Its torpedo-shaped buds, coppery and up to 2cm long, carry a distinctive criss-cross pattern.

A copper beech typically lives for 150 to 300 years, and some undisturbed specimens reach 400 or more in ideal conditions. At roughly 120 years old, the fallen tree was not yet at the end of its natural span, and it might have stood for generations more. It was still a young giant when the storm brought it down.

Two of the 1905 beeches remain, still marking the Marquess and Marchioness’s fifty years together, and they now stand as the last witnesses to the day the whole house, upstairs and down, raised a glass.