10th September 2011, 03:12 PM
Jack Wrote:A tree bole is the root and trunk (bottom of the trunk I think).
Not all tree-related feature is created by a tree falling over. Some trees/shrubs boles are pulled/dug out or burnt out.
I have even seen tree boles (stumps) being blasted out of the ground with slow-dynamite (I have interesting relatives!)
I've also heard tree grub-hole (my favourite).
I'm so sad that when on holiday/ going for walks I love investigating modern tree-throws and grub-holes. I've seen some that scarily look like dug pits where a tree with a certain root structure falls in such a way that the whole root bole comes out of the ground leaving a negative feature with fairly good edges all the way round......xx(
Think this explains some of the confusing conversations I've been involved in in the office over the years (including with Jack).
A tree bole is, as Jack has intimated, basically the bottom of the tree in its still-wooden format.
A tree bowl (aka tree-throw) is the bowl-shaped hole left after you've finished digging the mess made by the thing falling over and then rotting away or whatever.
In my book, on gravels and sands, and to a lesser extent on other subsoils (whatever they are!), the classice tree bowl/throw shows as a rough oval filled in the centre by deeper subsoil pulled-up by the main roots as the tree goes over and then eroded down into a heap, a thin crescent of darker soil representing the former ground-surface tipped on edge around the edge on the side towards which the tree fell and forced into the ground as it went over, and a much wider soily bit in the end that the tree fell from, representing silty of the hole left by the thing going over - amazes me how often thats the only bit people bother to dig and resulting in all those mystery crescent/banana-shaped features that litter site archives. Years back I worked on a big villa-landscape where I spent a couple of days working out the fall-direction of all the former trees on site, which identified an unsuspected Roman tree-lined avenue which had all fallen the same way (single storm?), no idea if that ever appeared in the final report though (if it's even published yet)