Slain

...Like giants, cut at the trunk, they lay splayed and dead in the mud.

This is one of several oak trees which I pass every day, which has sadly died and had to be felled. I have watched them over the weeks, first be felled, then have their branches removed and chopped up for fire wood. The trunks have been left in the field and the local children have had great fun climbing all over them.

Today I went for a closer look. They lay large, great hulks, in the grass and mud. Their bark is chunky and covered in gullies and colonised by moss and lichen - like an ancient landscape of fossilised lava or the rough cracked skin of a dinosaur.

Later, after tea, we went out and counted the rings to age the tree - this one, like all of the felled trees around it, is about 250 years old. I tried to image what it would have been like in the surrounding area all those years ago when they were little saplings and of all the comings and goings they have seen through the years.

I hope that when the field dries up they will be able to come and take the trunks away and make good use of the wood, but if not, then the insects will enjoy eating their way through them and in the meantime, the children will use them as a climbing frame, and walkers like me, a place to sit and wonder.