On the lane that runs below Old Oswestry hillfort, an old oak draws me up a rise with a gate-leaning view across the Shropshire plain. Under the dark, kinked boughs of this English oak, Quercus robur, through a clearing sky, the Wrekin floats above mist on the far horizon. And floaty seems to capture the mood of this world, lifted from the weight of interminable rain – its air damp and vague, hazy around the earthworks of the hillfort that’s echoed uncannily by its neighbouring iron-age settlement on the Wrekin far away; weirdly mysterious hidden histories of fields and woods are wrapped in the leaf buds overhead.
Around this oak tree is a world that is as familiar as skin and, to use a phrase that is already overused these days, “uncharted territory”. Next to this tree, poised above the steep holloway bank above the lane, is a coppiced oak. It’s the same species and may be the same age or even older, but it has six trunks only half the size of its neighbour. These coppice stools, where the central trunk was cut down long ago, are places of wonder. This one has the decaying remains of a trunk cut centuries ago with dendrothelmata – water-filled cavities, a rare habitat now.
Ever since our ancestors saw the magical regrowth of trees from browsing damage wrought by elk and bison, we have been cutting down oaks for timber, charcoal and tannin, letting them regrow and cutting them again – coppicing. The same is true for the hedge it’s part of – cutting to break the apical dominance of the leading bud produces an architecture of enclosure haunted by ancestral ghosts and community.
The more I see the coppiced oak, the more it reminds me of lichen. A different scale, but still a fusion of plant, fungi, algae and microbes – a place with its own ambient ecology. The more I look at old trees, the less I see them as histories of single plants and the more they become much older places created by symbiotic communities of life linked throughout great sweeps of land and time. The standard and coppiced oaks may appear as different forms of the same thing, but they are not.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024, is available now at guardianbookshop.com
