A community in Devon has raised £22,555 to turn a 500-year-old oak tree into what they believe will be the longest table ever crafted from a single English oak tree.
The 18 metre-long (59ft) Great Oak Table, capable of seating 60 people, was being built in a small patch of private woodland near Chagford, on the edge of Dartmoor.
It would, said Elizabeth-Jane Baldry, a local artist who owns the wood and conceived the idea, “be a 21st-century re-enchantment of the land: a rewilding with bells on because it brings in the element of human imagination and human flourishing, as well as nature restoration, to a wild space where people can gather to share food, friendship and lively conversation”.
“In its own small way, I want this table to be somewhere hope can be sparked that we can tip the world towards joy,” she added. “It’s a micro-project but these micro-projects are what are going to change the dialogue about how we can all move into a happier future.”
After two years of research, the group says it can find no reference to another table crafted from a single oak tree, apart from the 13-metre “Table for the Nation” made for Ely Cathedral.
Baldry bought the patch of low-grade agricultural land 18 years ago when it was rubbish-ridden and unloved. Naming it Pigwiggen Wood after a fairy knight, she and her two sons have since nurtured it into a nature and wildlife-rich sanctuary, where dormice nest and slow worms thrive.
Baldry had long harboured the dream of placing a long table at the forest’s heart.
“I knew it had to be oak, because there’s such a long tradition in British culture of oak as a great symbol of courage and endurance,” she said. But it took her a year to find one that was sufficiently long, ancient and magnificent.
“I was offered French oak but I said I wouldn’t import oak. I said it had to be Devon oak; every sawmill in Devon was on a search for over a year for a tree worthy of the project,” she said.
Eventually a tree was found: a 45 metre ancient oak that had fallen in a storm 15 years ago but lay undisturbed because the owner couldn’t bear to see it chopped up for firewood.
The project started two years ago with loans and financial gifts from the community. Now that crowdfunding has raised more than Baldry hoped, the loans can be repaid and the costs for the final work met.
“We can now finish making the table and open the space up for community events, such as parish picnics, immersion days for the local primary schoolchildren and quiet days when visitors can ditch their to-do lists and simply read, paint or relax in the dancing shadows of the leaves,” she said.
“Once in a while on one of those rare English summer evenings when the moon is bright and the sky is clear, the woodland glade will become a fairytale space for people to gather. There will be food and fellowship under the trees, the telling of tales and the sound of the harp,” she added.
Terri Windling, a neighbour and local folklore specialist, said bringing a table into a wild space “blurs the boundary between indoors and outdoors, wild and civilised”.
“It brings us, as a community, to a place that is wild and yet still part of human life. The fact that it’s a table is key. There are so many things you can do at a table: it’s where you gather with your family, with your friends, with your community to share food, sit and draw, or write or just be in the outdoors with neighbours that aren’t human: neighbours that are the plants and the animals and the insects.”
Another neighbour, Alan Lee, the Oscar-winning concept artist for the Lord of the Rings films, designed an elfin throne for the head of the table.
Baldry said: “I had this idea for a throne at the end, not for humans – because the whole thing about the table is that it’s a place where all are equal – but because I wanted to have the symbol of the larger world of which we’re all a part,.”
Beej Trigg Woods, the local carpenter who has spent two years on the project, said it was probably the most special design he would ever create.
“It’s humbling to work on wood this ancient, for a project that’s so meaningful,” he said. “I started when my son was just a few weeks old. I hope the table will still be standing when his grandchildren are able to sit round it.”
