Although British place names make frequent reference to different tree species, there can be few road signs giving directions to a single specimen. Nor can there be many English woods more steeped in story than Sherwood Forest.
I found a few incidental tales even as I walked up to the Major oak. There were fairy bonnet mushrooms painting their way across a dead stump like Lowry crowds through Salford. There were some last wasps around a waste bin, and wood pigeons so glutted on acorns their crops bulged. A robin laced its sad song among the birches, but sadder still was a bench with the following inscribed across its seat: “Abby Louise Hucknall – Missed So Much.” An emotional counterpoint came amid much open-armed laughter from the children playing along a Halloween-themed trail.
Then I arrived at the clearing and there was the biggest story of them all. It began about 1,100 years ago and has acquired a 10-metre waistband and two enormous stegosaurus-tail limbs, whose reach measures 90 metres around the top. The tree has worn out several names down the years – Cockpen Tree, Queen’s Oak – and even its modern version derives from an18th-century historian, Major Rooke.
In time we have mingled anxiety with awe, and in 1908 slung steel harnesses and chains to cradle vulnerable branches. By 1975, along with our hands-on affections, came trampling feet that compacted the ground and starved the tree of nutrients. Now there are 10 steel support buttresses and a high fence around to hold the estimated 5 million visitors every decade at an oak’s arm’s length from too much intimacy.
Yet why exactly should we privilege this one organism with all our reverence? After all, those fairy bonnets or the wasps are chemically more complex than any lifeless planet out in the galaxy. The wood pigeons rising out of the trees bear aloft a heritage of flight dating back to the Jurassic. Or is it, perhaps, a simpler human-sized story: that, after 400,000 days on Earth, this magnificent oak is still full of life, like those playing children, while much-missed Abby Hucknall, alas, is not.
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