AN ENGLISH ENT

Before I try to examine the ideas of sacred trees allow me to introduce you to the Silton Oak. Also known as Judge Wyndham's Oak. Legend has it that the judge held court in the shade of that tree back in the eighteenth century. 

I don't know this battered old oak kind of reminds me of Treebeard the Ent. I almost expect the tree to up roots and head out across the meadows of Dorset in England. 

The locals believe the tree is at least one thousand years old. It was a sapling when William the Norman invaded Englnd in 1066. Some taller when William's grandchildren, Stephen and Matilda, began a civil war that lasted nearly twenty years over who was going to plant their royal backsides on the English throne. In typical English stiff upper lippednes (is that a word) the Brits call it the "Anarchy."

That tree has witnessed wars and rumors of wars. Civil wars, religious wars. I don't know how close the tree is to the coast of Dorset. I could have witnessed the Spanish Armada sailing towards the Channel and a rendevous with a North Atlantic gale that broke the back of the Spanish fleet. Tree was barely more than five centuries old by then. 

It's said that the root system of an oak mirrors the tree canopy. If that's true this tree is truly magnificent underr the meadow grass. As of 2008 the trunk of the tree measured thrity eight feet in circumferance. That's more than a third of the way down a football field. I wish there was a way to learn the stories this old tree has to tell.