The Tree and the Stone
Julian Forbes-Laird writes…
This is one of the ca. 3m oaks at Chatsworth, which I photographed last year the day before I delivered a 2-day seminar there.
This is quite a tree dating challenge… if it was intact, it would be around 970 years old. But it’s not. Most of its crown has gone and there is sapwood interruption for ca. 30{aafb870310c7d71e7e351ad648f2013174c42263a646e8ad21e1d48becedf0d3} of the stem circumference. It has probably been ‘declining’ for around 300 years, with the surviving stem tissue making increasingly minimal increment in the process. In simple terms, it is, therefore, quite a bit older than it looks.
970 years old would give us an origin date of 1050, but I think we can at add least a century to that, taking us to 950AD.
In England, Eadred was on the throne, grandson of Alfred the Great. Eadred’s main achievement was the recapture of Northumbria in 954 from the Vikings under Erik Bloodaxe.
Can you see the stone? Was it there when the acorn sprouted? I like to think so…
