Early acorns and oak leaves

On my trip to Frampton Lake yesterday I picked up a small fallen branch from an oak tree. I think a large lorry must have scraped against the tree and brought it down to the ground.

I saw that it had some acorns and decided to bring it home with me. Today I took it out into our garden and took a few pictures of the acorns, which I'd noticed are quite prominent this year on most of the oak trees I have seen locally. These years when there are abundant seeds on oak trees are called mast years, particularly important to farmers when they wanted to fatten pigs before slaughter as they are a favourite food of pigs.  The Commoners' right of 'pannage' allowed those with those rights to graze on the acorn harvest or mast, and was particularly valuable in these special mast years.