Locals mourn loss of Wales’ oldest tree

Huw Williams wasn’t too worried when he was woken at 2.20am by a mighty crack. The old tree that stood 30ft behind Cilcochwyn, the farmhouse above the village of Pontfadog in Mid Wales, had probably lost another bough in the gale raging outside, he thought. He checked that everyone was safe and the roof intact and went back to sleep. The shock came when he went to work. Last weekend’s storm had blown itself out, but the tree that had overlooked the Ceiriog valley for 1,200 years, surviving tempest, battle, fire, the threat of flooding and 40 or more generations of people taking its wood for fuel and buildings had toppled.
By lunch the experts, the tree enthusiasts and the curious were arriving in Pontfadog. They marvelled that the tree’s branches showed six inches of growth in the past year, yet the tree had lost all its main roots and must have only been standing because of its weight. They mused about how much history it would have seen and nearly everyone said it was like losing a member of the community.
That evening, when the tourists had gone, about 30 locals from the valley gathered by the tree. “It was like a wake. We raised a glass to it,” said Dianne Coakley-Williams, Huw Williams’s wife.
The Pontfadog oak was the oldest tree in Wales, the third largest in Britain and one of the oldest in Europe. It was lying among the celandines and primroses in the bright spring sunshine, its roots pointing skywards, gnarled trunk collapsed and piles of branches, decayed wood, lichens, fungi, nests and bark in the grass around it.
Its massive, hollow bole had crushed a metal gate as it had fallen and the tips of its branches, which had been about to burst into leaf, were resting lightly on Cilcochwyn’s purple slate roof. What had been called “Wales’s national tree”, whose girth had been measured at over 53ft in 1881, looked small and shrunken.
“It was always a working tree, pollarded or pruned for its wood. It was part of the community. People built houses from it, cooked from it. That’s why it lived so long. It always had a role,” said Moray Simpson, tree officer for Wrexham county borough council and a board member of the Ancient Tree Forum. At some point the tree and Wales’s history merged. It alone was said to have been spared when King Henry II’s men razed the Ceiriog Woods in 1165. The Welsh prince OwainGwynedd is believed to have then rallied his army beneath it before taking on, and defeating, the English at the battle of Crogen, fought just two miles down the valley.
No one knew quite how old it was because it had lost its heartwood, but Michael Lear, a tree expert with the National Trust, visited Pontfadog in 1996 and wrote to Josie Williams: “Using Forestry Commission techniques, the youngest it can be is 1,181 years, the oldest 1,628 years. “I cannot find a record of an oak tree of any of the 500 species internationally which has a greater girth anywhere in the world.”
“It was the national tree of Wales and one of the oldest oaks in Europe. I’m desperately trying to find people who can help in propagating from the tree by either grafting or micro-propagation in order to maintain its genotype. Kew Gardens have said they are interested,” said Simpson. In fact, the tree could have been saved for many more years. Last year a group from the Ancient Tree Forum visited Pontfadog and, seeing it was vulnerable to a big wind, put together a list of actions costing £5,700 that they thought might have protected it. Despite a petition of 6,000 signatures to the Welsh assembly, no money could be found.
But tree experts warned last week that many would fall if they were not better protected. “We protect old buildings and other historic manmade structures but there’s nothing for our oldest living monuments,” said Jill Butler, conservation policy adviser at the Woodland Trust.
No decision has been made on what to do with the Pontfadog oak beyond moving it off the farmhouse roof. Left to decompose, it could continue to provide a habitat for wildlife for another 100 years. There have been proposals to resurrect it as a monument or make a bardic chair from its wood. But Dianne Coakley-Williams is adamant it should not leave the valley. “It lived here and it will stay here,” she says.
Happily, it has its descendants. Two saplings grown from its acorns are believed to be in the Botanical Garden of Wales and another may be at the local hospital.