JadeW

Although this former royal forest is most famous for its beeches, which rise like gigantic organ pipes 30m overhead, we were on the search for bigger quarry. Among this landscape of clay-rooted tree and squirrel and muntjac and white-barred brambling sifting beechmast on the woodland floor, there are a dozen or so quietly cloistered ancient oaks. It took us ages to find the Cathedral Oak, a glorious 12-trunked brute that was jammed tight against a chain-link fence, which seemed far too everyday a context for so venerable an organism. The tree is reputed to date to the Norman Conquest.

Not so the mossy, club-footed veteran known as Old Paunchy, which, at several hundred years, is a stripling in comparison with the others. As we stood before the Big Belly Oak, a hollowed-out monster with a great steel brace around its midriff, we pondered what it was they made us feel and why. The temptation is to name them all as beautiful, but the Big Belly Oak has the coarse, fissured surfaces of a huge dinosaur. If a stegosaurus were ever beautiful, then so is this tree. The other temptation is to say they are magnificent, but in truth they are squat, solid, asymmetric and without regularity of feature, grace or bright colour.

Is it because they contain all our post-Norman human history in one stump? Or is it our time-lapse reflections on all those billions of other organisms that have lived and flourished in their complex embrace over the past millennium? Could it also be that they turn death into a sort of living process? The extraordinary oak called King of Limbs has been shedding branches, rotting down slowly for decades, possibly centuries.

It is surely also that they simply are. They endure. And in their presence we can only stand and wonder at all that they have been and into what future they journey still.

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