The big old horse chestnut at Wenlock Priory has been pruned. I expect it’s to do with reducing the great limbs of its crown to prevent the tree falling apart in gales. The amputations have an odd symmetry and, although the idea is for new growth to reshape the tree, it looks now like a ruin among the ruins of the medieval monastery. There may be five centuries between the destruction of the priory following its dissolution in 1540 and the pruning of the tree this winter but they seem so similar, as if made of the same strange fabric.
Timber and masonry are, as Rose Macaulay said in Pleasure of Ruins (1953), “part of the ruin-drama staged perpetually in the human imagination”. It’s divided in two, she says: a desire to build them up and then knock them down. There is a sense that the lopped tree in the priory grounds now joins the remains of the past to be preserved as heritage. The horse chestnut was planted to enhance the landscape around the ruins, but it could not be allowed to disintegrate naturally through wind and rain and snowfall. A veneration of age extends to old trees: it behoves us to maintain it as a version of itself, if not its natural self.
Horse chestnut trees, Aesculus hippocastanum, have a tall arching architecture, great white candle flowers, spiny conkers and vivid autumn colour. Originally from the Pindus and Balkan mountains, they have a strong presence in this landscape and its culture. Many horse chestnuts as old as this one – about 100 years – have succumbed to disease and been felled, so it seems right to try to keep some and help them weather various kinds of storms.
I write this on Imbolc, the pagan festival of the coming spring, and the Christian festival of Candlemas. As sunlight plays across the remains of tree and monastery separated from their pasts in this place, it illuminates the ruin of winter. The last winter moon, the stirring half-song of birds, the snowdrops pushed through like white crayons – this is treasure, bright and new in the wreckage of age. As Edward Thomas said in his poem But These Things Also, “Something to pay Winter’s debts”.
