The twin-trunked ash tree stands just out of the hedge on its medieval bank. It catches the last rays of the sun tipping over Wenlock Edge, the western rise of Corve Dale. The tree is a veteran, heading towards what the poet John Clare would call an “old, huge, ash-dotterel”. It may have been a boundary marker, to do with smallholdings, quarries, lime kilns, charcoal burning, parish edges – a fixed point in a world turning in and out of its own past.
This is ash woodland country but there are many places connected with this kind of industry and settlement that are marked in some, as yet mysterious, way by big old ash – Æsc in Old English – open grown, cleared around so their individual character can be seen from a distance. This tree’s point is divided, cloven: two huge trunks, like legs sticking out of the ground, rise to then drop cascades of rattley, stiff, black-budded branches; a split ash, perhaps stepped through to cure hernias, rickets, impotence; perhaps a shrew ash in which a shrew (at one time feared for cursing cattle) was walled up in a hole and the tree venerated; a two-headed tree, north and south, both facing west.
The way the sunset spotlights this particular tree, amongst the long shadowy miles of the dale, is uncanny. This, its moment, is one to be acknowledged, in that offhand, secular, not-making-a-fuss reverence we have for trees when they become recognised as special in some way. The strange and beautiful lighting illuminates what has been there donkey’s years, perhaps anonymously for most of them and noticed by very few now.
The historical ecologist Oliver Rackham said old ash accumulate ecological and cultural value with age: “one 200-year-old ash can be a series of ecosystems for which 10,000 50-year-old ashes are no use at all”. This 200-year-old’s holes and cracks are invaluable for beetles, birds and bats, its base-rich bark for lichens, mosses and liverworts; it is so packed full of fungi, insects, spiders that it hums with life. Winter trees offer so much more character without their leaves, which in ash arrive late and leave early anyway. And this “old ash-dotterel” is glowing.
