Folklore of the forest

Upon arrival you will have to seek out the biggest, oldest, most gnarled and spookiest of its innumerable big, old, gnarled and spooky inhabitants. And then you get your kit off.

Once naked, it’s easy. All you have to do is dance 12 times, anti-clockwise around this monstrous, haggard, craggy, ancient fellow and you will be able to summon the devil. At least, that’s what local legend has for countless generations insisted.

What folklore doesn’t mention, by way of a warning, is that you better keep your eyes and ears peeled while prancing full monty around the forest’s most monumental resident because traffic along the A346 runs within a whisker of that hoary, grizzled old man.

Anyone who has travelled the Swindon-Salisbury road, beneath a majestic and shadowy canopy of overhanging branches, will be aware of this magnificent, though admittedly cracked and ailing character, The Big Belly Oak.

Driving past Big Belly is like catching sight of an old pal. You always look out for that grand old bastion of the forest and it is reassuring to know he is still there. To mark the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, Big Belly – he of the bulging 35ft girth – was named among The 50 Great British Trees.

Now, 12 years later, he has been shortlisted by the Woodland Trust among ten contenders to find England’s Tree of the Year.

If longevity has anything to do with it then Big Belly – the country’s oldest oak – is in with a shout… despite the ignominy of being fitted with a metal corset in 2002 to prevent the wizened old boy from unceremoniously splitting in half.

If trees had memories Big Belly could cast his back a staggering 1,119 years, having first seen the light of day – say experts – in 895.

Alfred the Great was still fighting the Vikings back then, while the Battle of Hastings was 171 years in the future.

It seems truly wondrous that something has been alive for so long. And although he is pretty much on his last legs, the venerable codger still continues to sprout new leaves every year.

But Big Belly isn’t, by any means, the only grand, archaic and creaky old tree at Savernake Forest – or indeed, the only one which is named and has some history and a legend attached to it.

Most folklore prescribed to these knobbly, noble monarchs involves some form of ritualistic jiggery pokery such as chanting, dancing and reciting mantras, often beneath a full moon and occasionally in the buff.

Located on a plateau between Marlborough and Great Bedwyn, 4,500-acre Savernake Forest – a popular spot for Swindonians wishing to explore the Great Outdoors and maybe collect a few conkers – is well over a millennium old.

Its name first appeared as “Safernoc” in 934 in the written records of The First King of all England”– Alfred’s grandson Athelstan. The Normans collared it as a royal hunting forest soon after 1066 and many a King of England has enjoyed chasing stags through its picturesque patchwork of woodland, copses and rough pasture.

None more so than Henry VIII during his pre-big belly days when he could actually manoeuvre himself onto a horse in pursuit of deer. What he also bagged in Savernake Forest was a wife – the love of his life, no less. The daughter of Warden of Savernake Sir John Seymour, Jane Seymour in the mid-1500s caught the sovereign’s eye during a hunting expedition at Savernake.

After despatching Anne Boleyne on the block he took the well-connected Wiltshire wench for his third wife. Henry loved Sweet Jane so much that he refrained from having her head chopped off. Now that’s commitment!

She died, sadly, in childbirth while delivering the next King of England, Edward VI.

The Golden Age of Savernake Forest occurred around a couple of hundred years later when the First Earl of Ailesbury Thomas Bruce (see panel) hired “England’s Greatest Gardener,” Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to work his magic.

It was de rigueur in that era for members of the landed gentry to transform their starchily formal parklands into something far more Disneyesque – and no-one was more capable than Capability.

His imprint remains at Savernake to this day; at just under four miles, The Grand Avenue, running through the heart of the forest, is Britain’s longest tree-lined avenue.

At its centre is The Eight Walks, which radiates into the darkened forest like spokes from a giant wagon-wheel. Savernake also acquired its own Nelson’s Column – four years before the Battle of Trafalgar – in 1789. The 110ft Ailesbury Column was erected on the brow of Three Oak Hill, partly to commemorate George III’s recovery from madness.

It should have been pulled down a couple of years later, though, as the affliction soon returned to the mad monarch who never fully recovered his marbles.

Nearly 150 years later American servicemen, recuperating from injury at Savernake during World War Two, irreverently used the copper urn on top of the column for a spot of target practice.

All of this time – during which more than 50 kings and queens ruled the nation – Big Belly kept a silent vigil by the side of that oft-used track that later became a toll road and is now the A346.

But he wasn’t the only giant lurking in the woods. Many other olden goldies loiter in Savernake where, amidst the gloomy morning mist or fading evening light, their skeletal, brooding frames acquire an almost ghostly veneer.

• As a reward for his bloody work on behalf of William the Conqueror, Richard Esturmy, one of the victorious knights of the Norman Invasion, was rewarded with the gift of Savernake Forest.

   

  Since then Savernake estate and forest has passed down from father to son – or daughter on four occasions – who have become hereditary “forest wardens”.

  In 31 generations, it has never once been bought or sold and today remains Britain’s only ancient forest still in private hands.

  The Earl of Cardigan is the current owner but most of Savernake is managed by the Forestry Commission.

  It is thought that nowhere else in Europe boasts such a concentration of “veteran” trees as Savernake where there are hundreds of centuries old oaks, beeches and others.

  Some are so significant that they appear on local maps or have become parish boundary markers.

   

• I HAVE no idea whether JR Tolkien ever visited Savernake Forest. But if he did he may well have inspired to create The Ents – those strapping, burly tree people in Lord of the Rings – from the mighty greybeards that populate the former royal hunting forest.

   

  If Big Belly is the grand-daddy of the ancient oaks, then Cathedral Oak is snapping at its heels; over 1,000 years old, it is more than 30ft in diameter – but is in much better nick than BB.

  Of similar vintage The Duke’s Vaunt – now a tad shattered – was in 1762 said to have had a door and lock fitted to its mammoth hollow trunk enabling as many as “20 choirboys” to shelter inside.

  The amusingly named Old Paunchy is around 700 years old while in the thick of the forest, the 500 year-old Green Fluted Oak has been described “an impossible tree to find.”

  No-one quite knows the location any more of Creeping Oak whose unusual stooping posture was in 1826 described as “very agreeable to the eye of the painter.”

  Pointing Oak, sadly, doesn’t point anymore, its “pointing finger” having recently decayed and fallen.

  Another splendid specimen that pre-dates the Norman Conquest, King of Limbs has been described as “one of the most magnificent trees in the forest.” The secluded oak so impressed rock group Radiohead, who were recording nearby, that they named their 2011 album after it.

  Many a Radiohead fan has been known to wander the forest in head-scratching mode searching for this exemplary example of Mother Nature’s engineering in order to pay homage – and of course, to snap a selfie.