When I was a kid there were a good few family outings to Sherwood Forest, These involved a lot of walking but that was OK because I knew that as part of the walk we’d visit The Major Oak, the hollow tree in which Robin Hood supposedly, mythically, hid from the Sheriff of Nottingham. The tree’s named after Major Hayman Rooke, author of a small book titled Remarkable Oaks in which he described and drew the tree.
By ‘visit’ I don’t mean just standing there looking at the tree or even walking around it, no, in those days you could actually go insidethe tree, into the very cavity where Robin Hood had (supposedly) hidden. It wasn’t a very big cavity as I remember, not much bigger than kid-size, and the internal ‘walls’ of the tree were worn to a glassy smoothness by all the bodies that had rubbed against them over the centuries.
I haven’t given this a vast amount of thought over the years but I had no doubt that what we’d all done so innocently back in the day was obviously bad and wrong from a conservationist point of view, and I had seen recent pictures of the Major Oak, with a Dali-esque arrangement of struts supporting the branches.
Turns out it was worse than I thought. Even walking around the tree created damage. Footsteps from hundreds of thousands of visitors compacted the soil, preventing rainwater and nutrients from fallen leaves getting down to the tree roots. A fence was eventually built around it to keep pedestrians and others away and the tree has been saved, even if it’s not looking its very best.
I’m prepared to accept my own small responsibility for the overall state of the Major Oak, on the other hand …
Last autumn I was walking in Essex and came across a big (if not major) oak tree, and under it were a lot of acorns. I picked up a handful, took them home, put them in compost in pots to overwinter, and come late spring there was absolutely no sign of germination so I used the pots and compost to grow other things, including poppies which are fugitive, see Robbie Burns:
‘But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;
But then last week, clearing out the poppies that had been and gone and died, I saw to my amazement that a very minor oak was growing in one of the pots. Oh boy!
I realize this is only the very smallest act of reparation for my mistreatment of the Major Oak, but we all do what we can.
