Wellingtonia 97

After having done Newton Abbot, we thought to take ourselves to Stover Country Park, a sort of wetland woodland version of Horton Country Park, partly because it was there, partly because BH's mother had been stationed in the big house up the road, as a VAD (as they were then known), for a short while during the second world war, for which see reference 2.

A place which turned out to have plenty of trees and plenty of ponds. With the catch being that we could not get very close to this Wellingtonia, well protected as it was by the ponds. Notwithstanding, given the zoom, despite its unusual shape and relatively short stature, I am pretty confident that what we have here is indeed a Wellingtonia.

As luck would have it, the park and the house fall on the boundary between the two relevant maps, both surveyed in 1887. The road running across the top left corner of the composite snap above is what subsequently became the A38 and I think that the Wellingtonia here is to the right of that and above the thin end of the lake. Big house, lower middle.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/10/wellingtonia-96.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Aid_Detachment. From which entry the second world war is largely missing, but it still gives the idea.

Group search keys: wgc, nwa.