Majesty

Twenty one years ago we visited the Ankerwyke Yew near Wraysbury, it was the first time I met something so ancient; it would have been alive at the time of the Buddha, predating the christian era by 500 years.

Its posited as a likely location for the signing of the Magna Carta, old trees being a good landmark.

FFW a couple of decades and we eventually got it together to visit the Majesty Oak, the unpollarded “Maiden” oak in Nonnington. Websites put its age between five hundred years to eight hundred years old. The current guardian told me that Ted Green said it was between 900 and 1300. Either way it was already old when the old house was built, and it is still putting out a full green crown.

Photographs don’t really prepare you for the experience. The girth is around twelve metres, and the silence and scale put me in a blissful state.

The old photograph above shows it in winter beside Fredville House. The house is gone — demolished after the war — and the oak that was merely its garden ornament has outlived it, as it outlived whoever planted it, if anyone planted it at all. It will very likely outlive us too. There is something steadying about standing under a thing that treats centuries the way we treat seasons.