Gog-Magog Oaks, the Last Trees of Selwood Forest
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Contents Updated: Thursday, 26 October 2006
Gog-Magog Oaks
Early morning, walking the hedgerows near Glastonbury, the mist rising wraithlike from the Somerset levels and hovering about the copses and hedgerows like white-cloaked figures plotting a tragedy. The sun is wan, too weak, it seems, to interfere, but soon it would nevertheless. Round a bend in the puddly trackway and before you stand two octupoid monsters, their arms outstretched ready to snare you.
Blink! Two ancient trees with gnarled and knobbled trunks, holed and pitted with ledge-like steps of massive bracket fungi—a Rackham illustration brought to life. Trunks of huge girth and writhing twisting branches looking as if the Kraken had woken. Gog and Magog, legendary figures and legendary trees in the Somerset landscape, allegedly the two survivors of a Druid grove, young when Joseph of Arimathea was said to have planted the Glastonbury thorn tree.
In fact, rather than 2000 years old, they are probably a thousand years or so, and perhaps truly the heritage of the old Saxon kingdom of Wessex. As a rule of thumb, an oak tree takes 300 years to mature, 300 years as a mature tree and 300 years to decay and die. The last 300 years are the 300 that are least likely to be seen. Foresters and private citizens alike will cut down old trees and plant new ones, if they replace them at all. Yet, the 300 years of decay are part of the living environment, and the slow death of an ancient tree means life for countless beetles, lichens, fungi, centipedes, toads and snails, while the natural cavities in old standing trees, often hidden by ivy, are the homes of birds, bats, small animals and many insects.
Hail to Gog and Magog! We who are about to die salute thee! Will anyone still be alive in another 1000 years to admire the ancient trees growing new today?
