Lost Art Press

When Old Oaks Fall

Posted on by Kara Uhl

I first learned about the Nannau oak while working on “Honest Labour: The Charles Hayward Years.” Flipping through every page of every issue of The Woodworker magazine, I skimmed a lot of text. But a lot of what Hayward wrote slowed me down, like this entry in the Diary, a regular smattering of bits and pieces of news all somewhat related to wood that I loved to read.

Old Welsh Oaks

The unexpected fall, about six weeks ago, of the giant oak tree in Powis Castle Park, Welshpool, recalls other historic oak trees in Wales. There was the Nannau oak, near Welshpool, which fell suddenly after a great storm in 1813. As the “haunted” tree it was long an object of superstitious dread. The legend goes that in a quarrel Owain Glyndwr slew his cousin, the Lord of Nannau, and thrust his body into the hollow trunk of the old oak. Not far from the Nannau oak is another which is connected with Owain Glyndwr, and is called Glyndwr’s Oak or The Shelton Oak. It is now a gnarled old specimen, and the story tells that from its branches Glyndwr watched the fate of his ally, Henry Hotspur, at the battle of Shrewsbury, in 1403. Owain was unable to reach Hotspur, on account of the swollen state of the Severn, the bridges being held by the King. The tree is now so hollow with age that several persons at a time can stand inside its trunk.

–– Charles Hayward

Still we read about the falls of great oaks, such as as BBC’s coverage of the estimated 1,000-year-old Buttington Oak, which fell two miles from Welshpool, Wales, in October 2018.

The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about an obituary for the Salem Oak in June 2019.

The New York Times covered the 2017 cutting down of the 600-year-old “Old Oak Tree” in the churchyard of a Presbyterian church in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.

How can you write 500 words, 1,000 words, on the death of a tree? Turns out, once you become an old-enough tree, you become the topic of (or, perhaps more often, the setting of) legends. True, untrue, it doesn’t matter. It’s difficult to read about a centuries-old oak that has died without also reading some fantastic tale associated with it. And once I started researching the Nannau oak, I realized there was just so much story to work with, which led me to “The Mabinogion” itself. How to turn this into something? I had no idea. But I couldn’t let it go which I suppose is the way most somethings begin.

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

16 thoughts on “When Old Oaks Fall”

  4. All ancient oaks in Britain have history. Someone famous hiding in them, under them or behind them. Or being planted by or haunted by. Or the acorns having magic properties (often to do with brides and nuptials). I had the good fortune to be able to buy two oak pews from a local church. One of these was sadly beyond being a pew any longer but has been given a new lease of life as bowls, stools, garden dibbers, crucifixes and other items. The pews were installed in 1884 and the large size of the timber suggests that the tree from where some of it was hewn was planted before 1700. It is also entirely possible that Thomas Paine had sat on it as he was a worshipper at the church before going to America.

  5. As an Anglophile who has been into reading all things British medieval over the past six decades, and having photographed all the major cathedrals and castles in England, Scotland and Ireland in the last three decades, when I heard that the cathedral in York had had a fire in the roof which required replacing some oak beams and restoring a stained glass rose window, I wondered what had been done with the wood removed. It turned out that the oak that could be used was made in fine fountain and ballpoint pens and were for sale to raise money for the work, I HAD to have one. Not every day can you have a pen turned from 900 year old wood from a place you have visited more than once!

    1. Oh my word, having not even been there, I still think that would be an amazing kind of pen to own! That’s so cool. 🙂

  6. There is a fairly recent book by Valerie Trouet, “Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings” that is an excellent read. There is a lot of great material on ancient trees.

  7. Brings back memories of my childhood living in Florida and all the fantastic, huge live oak trees. And who can forget that children’s song, London oaks are falling down, falling down, falling down….

    1. … except, Jesse, when we sang it it was London Bridge which was falling down.

  11. On a dare, cousin Dave and I confirmed the White Oak was hollow when we were 10 years old. A little shoveling around the raccoon entrance and we were able to wriggle in on our backs. Lucky for us no raccoons were home. 60 years later the trunk collapsed. Following Oak tradition it crashed to the ground on a dry windless day. A few days later an ancient woodchuck decided to crawl under the now horizontal trunk and die undisturbed. There he laid all winter, melting away in the Spring still untouched. Proving I guess even a coyote won’t eat a dead woodchuck.

  12. Having worked for a few years in Sequoia National Park, I was intrigued with stories of 200+ foot tall, 2000 year old Giant Sequoias. One summer there was a report of one such tree falling. The next day a woman described hearing the rumble, then the earth shaking after the tree fell. I saw the tree on the ground a week later. The bright red of a fresh sequoia fragments told me it was freshly fallen.

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