Pitsligo Castle Garden:The Catshead Apple

The North West corner of the North West  garden contains a group of trees beneath which there is a spread of Arum lilies. The tree nearest the camera in the picture above is  a plum, adjacent to this and growing against the west wall is the most interesting of the trees, a Catshead apple, beyond the apple is a laburnum and a group of elders. The Catshead appears to be of a great antiquity.

Catshead is one of the oldest known English apples and is thought to date from the early 17th century. It is a cooking apple with an acidic fruit which cooks down to a  puree. The name comes from the supposed resemblance of the fruit to the shape of a cat's head. Grey Granite hopes to be able to check this out in the autumn.

The Pitsligo Catshead is a large spreading  tree with a gnarled, twisted trunk calloused and encrusted with ivy. It retains some vestiges of the espalier  into which it must originally have been trained against the wall. There are horizontal rows of nails in the wall among the branches indicating how the tree was trained. 

The Catshead appears to blossom earlier in the year than the newer varieties of apple in the orchard. James Grieve, Newton Wonder,Arthur Turner and the Conference pear  had open blossom on 3rd June when these pictures were taken. By this date the Catshead blossom had mainly shed its petals, only  a few blossoms such as the one pictured above still had fading petals,hopefully these will set fruit.

The nails vary in shape and size,many like the nail pictured above, may date from the  17th or 18th century when nails were hand  forged from a precut bar of iron. Characteristically these early nails have a square shank with a pyramidal rose head. Both the shaft and head show small hammer marks.

From about 1811 nails were machine cut - the shank then had two parallel sides and two tapered opposite sides. 

The Catshead trunk. Could this  venerable tree be a living link with  the Jacobites of Pitsligo Castle and of a time when orchard was famed  for the quality and variety of fruit it produced?