Encounter with a Fenland Oak Table
In 2012 an ancient black fen oak, now known as The Jubilee Oak, revealed itself in a field in the Wissington Fens in West Norfolk, England.
Witness to past climatic shifts, this giant had lain there for 5,000 years. When it fell it is thought to have been around 55 metres tall and was perfectly straight.
In the hands of master craftsmen, the black oak, Britain’s ‘most rare and prized hardwood’, has been transformed into a 13.2 metre long table; a ‘Table for the Nation’. After being in residency at Ely, Rochester and Lincoln cathedrals, the table is currently in residency in Lichfield cathedral.
I visited this oak-table-ancestor on Friday 13th September 2024, whilst it was in Lincoln cathedral, reminding us of the lost landscape of the Fens that once surrounded this cathedral-on-the-edge.
This piece was written two days later, on 15th September 2024. The experience didn’t lend itself to taking photos at the time, so the photo above is of a different but resonant tree encounter near Redbourne, North Lincolnshire where tall oaks such as the one used for the table once grew and were used to make traditional log boats and rafts in that area during the Bronze Age.
Friday 13th September 2024
As we once again face vast and rapid changes, including the inevitable loss, in time, of at least some of the Fenlands, I come to meet you today, entering quietly into the cavernous interior of the cathedral.
I come to sit with you as I have sat with so many tree kin over the years, sleeping at their roots, listening back to back with them, my spine registering our connection, responding to their movements in the wind, feeling the resonance of surprising sounds that emanate from their trunks.
I come to pay my respects.
I come with curiosity about your appearance and presence in the world at this precise moment.
I come to witness your skin with mine, to witness the careful work of the hands of the many who brought you from your resting place.
I come to witness you with all my senses awake, to encounter the liminal space, the thin place that you carry, that surrounds you. For although these thin places are thought to exist at certain locations, they can also be carried in the aura of ‘objects’ which are not ‘objects’ but kin - rocks, sculptures, furniture, imbued with spirit of place and deep time.
I approach you slowly, walk your length and breadth at what feels like a respectful distance. Our fields must attune so we do not startle one another. I expected a large and powerful presence extending far out beyond your physical form, yet this is not the sense of you that I find. Once the feeling of settling is tangible I take a seat on a bench beside you, leaning in with the front of my body to the length of your side.
Slowly I place my hands on your surface, body and skin witness to the condensed aliveness instantly transmitted from your dark wood through my palms and fingertips. Viriditas.
Eyes closed I am in a dark place, a void, Kairos time.
There is nothing here except potent life-force. Fecundity. Potential.
In this place, birth and death merge and are gone. There is silence, the like of which I have only previously encountered deep in underground caves.
I remain here for a while before returning through my fingertips to your surface.
I stand. With my fingers I trace the exquisite river joints that flow along your length. No straightened waterways here.
Your form invites recumbency, invites the length of me to be parallel with the earth’s surface, rather than perpendicular, though you, like me, have known both.
You invite reach, stretch, a kind of clarity - condensing and releasing that which had eluded awareness; a resonance with that which has not yet been spoken, with that which has lain buried.
It feels like time to leave now. I do so slowly, once again walking your length and breadth, tracing your sides with my hand. Touched by you as I touch. Touched by the potent life-force you hold so quietly within.
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