During our shopping expedition (don’t get excited, by shopping, I mean a trip to the tyre shop to get my winter tyres put back on the Sunshine bus, the supermarket to get fresh veg and Trago to get a power supply for our print server, which got frazzled in the last big storm we had) we had cause to drive down a road in a village near to our home and saw this. DM had seen it before because it’s on his route to work and he goes out in daylight and he’d even mentioned it to me but I’d not taken in what he said. I was shocked and saddened to see such a mighty tree fallen in this way.

For reasons best left unsaid, we were on our way out at just after 8am so I asked for a pit stop on the way back to photograph the tree because it wasn’t fully light at that time. Close inspection revealed that the tree is a beech which appears to be several hundred years old looking at its great girth. It came down with tremendous force, snapping great branches like twigs. I know the branches that snapped wouldn’t have yielded easily because I spent a good deal of my summer hauling logs around and cutting them with a chain saw. They were logs that had been cut for several years, and hence had already lost a great deal of their integrity, before we took the saw to them too. I’ve also had fairly extensive experience of digging up root balls of plants that have died or need to be moved for one reason or another. I can tell you that when you are trying to move a root ball of a blackcurrant bush and realise how difficult it is to free it from the soil, you learn respect for the root structure of these massive trees and I say again, they would not have yielded easily. Closer inspection still showed that branches had been driven into the earth and you could see their path under the turf. When the tree fell, it fell hard.

We should be thankful that it fell into the church yard, I suppose. Had it fallen in the other direction, it would have blocked one of the main arterial roads to the moor and probably done severe damage to the homes opposite. It feels wrong somehow though to be pleased it fell into this field of the fallen. Under its broken and twisted branches are smashed headstones of graves. There is even one headstone that is piercing the tree’s trunk and effectively holding the trunk off the ground. This is a very old (technically it doesn’t classify as ancient) burial site – the church is a 13th C building and these graves contain the remains of people who fell from this mortal coil a very long time ago. It is a great shame that a wonderful, peaceful space has been damaged by one of its own fallen guardians - the trees stand like sentries around its perimeter.