The Horse Chestnut
The villagers don’t take much notice of the old horse chestnut tree anymore.
It towers over the roadside, thick roots anchoring it beneath the misshapen granite hedgerow, weathered stones cradled in mossy fingers. These days its presence is overshadowed by the nearby oaken corridor, two rows of gnarled figures forming an arboreal sabre arch for anyone that wanders the lane beneath.
No one is sure how long the horse chestnut has stood but it may have been planted by the local blacksmith several hundred years ago to shade the horses waiting to be shod at the nearby forge. These days it has forgone some of its earlier elegance. Its thick, weather-beaten trunk is twisted and cankerous, decorated with lumps and hollows alike. In its broad crown sits the gap where it was once badly pollarded and never quite grew back. And its trunk bears a scar where it was struck by lightning during a storm that caused the tree to lose a branch - a sacrifice which ultimately saved it from becoming entirely engulfed in flames.
At Beltane, the horse chestnut’s spring flowers appear. Great candy floss candelabra’s that cascade down the crown. In years gone by it overlooked the ewes’ suckling lambs in the balmy spring sunshine, their gentle bleats providing an undertone to men calling from neighbouring fields as they erected scarecrows to watch over the barley. And on a dark night, when one of the ewes struggled to lamb, the horse chestnut’s candles seemed to add extra illumination to the field. The farmer, bent by his oil lamp, worked to help the mother bring new life into the world, pulling on the front legs till the bundle slipped out, before he tore at the sac around its mouth and its mother licked it to life. As he leant back on his heels, he felt the relief flood his veins and his stomach flutter like the moths around the hedgerow honeysuckle, till a tawny owl, hooting gently from the horse chestnut’s boughs, calmed his heart.
Now the sheep are gone, the wool not as lucrative as it once was. The current farmers’ focus is solely on winter barley. In spring he mounts his tractor, pulling a crop sprayer that showers the field in chemicals, clearing weeds and wildflowers alike, leaving only the newly growing barley stalks. But the flowers of the horse chestnut offer a lifeline and the bees hum around it, attracted by the rich nectar. When they leave, their baskets laden and their fur powdered with pollen, they head back to their hive to make a smooth honey. It would have once been made in the farmers’ skeps to be added to cake or stirred into the cider pressed from the old orchard, before that was paved over with the new bypass. A blue tit stalks the horse chestnuts’ branches, picking at the insects that run along the bark and the sound of hammering echoes across the field as a woodpecker excavates a nest in the trunk.
In bygone summers the farmer, joined by the county’s sheep clippers, took refuge from the midday sun beneath the horse chestnut’s parasol crown, the sheep temporarily gated in its shade. Coarse hands deftly steadied the animals as the shears cut the fleece off in one swift movement and the wool piled up. Afterwards, the men celebrated with home-brewed beer, surrounded by the lingering smell of lanolin, and salted-sweat, their backs resting against the tree’s steady trunk, grateful for its heavy shadow.
Now the mechanical whirr of the harvester replaces the swish of scythes, threshing the ears and winnowing the chaff with little effort. The last of the skylarks pirouette above as the crops are swiftly felled beneath its blades, any more efforts at nesting thwarted for the year.
The villagers may once have gathered beneath the horse chestnut’s canopy, watching as the last of the barley was reaped and held high to the cheers of the onlookers before they headed off to the village for a celebratory feast, the children weaving corn dollies from the leftover stems and sneaking brown bread and marmalade. But with such traditions lost within the folds of time, the barley stubble is left shorn and uncelebrated in the vibrating heat before the field is cultivated once more.
Come September, groups of children make their way along the path, back and forth to the local village school, new shoes shining in the autumn sun. In years gone by, they would have gathered beneath the horse chestnut, collecting conkers from the branches that hung over the road. The children would have jostled to get the biggest, shiniest, or roundest, throwing sticks into the tree and causing a shower of spiky green cases, tearing into them to reveal and compare their mahogany gems before stuffing them into pockets. The crepey, orange leaves, edges burnt from the long summer, would have been kicked high, fluttering them across the road or gathered in handfuls and thrown at each other, the sounds of rustling lost beneath laughter. The local women would have collected some to shell and grind into flour, making loaves for the village harvest fair, all hoping to win first prize. And in the field, the farmer would have gathered the leftover conkers and ground them down to feed to his horses, boosting the shine in their coats.
But the women don’t come any more and whilst the smallest children pocket a few conkers, still at the age to be lured in by shiny treasures, most of the kids are bent double over screens or scuffling and joking together as they amble along, discussing games and videos. The conkers are mostly ignored as they fall into the road, giant SUVs crushing them beneath heavy wheels and scattering them across the ribbon of asphalt. But the red deer stop to take a few as they slink along the hedgerow, helping build their fat stores for the winter. The leaves are left to pile up and mulch and become a gathering place for woodlice and millipedes before the road sweeper comes along and sucks them all away.
On the other side of the hedgerow, the conkers also lay untouched by human hands; the farmer has no use for them now, the horses switched out for machinery long ago. The next generation of crops have been planted and the horse chestnut provides a sanctuary for the birds hoping for the last of the insects before the winter comes. But food is sparse now as the neighbouring fields have become an extensive building site, a large shiny board advertising the sleek new housing estate with identical plastic doors and identical plastic lawns.
When winter settles across the landscape the goldfinches picking the seeds from the bones of the hedgerow teasels bring a flash of colour to the pewter sky. A plastic bag, caught in the horse chestnut’s branches, rises with the wind like a ghostly apparition and it sparks the memory of a story passed down through the generations. A few of the older villagers, gathered in the pub and deep in drink, take to storytelling. One tells of a winter of long ago when the ground was hardened by frost, and the villager’s hearts hardened by an accusation. The story, so entwined with folklore no living soul knows what is true, tells of a maiden’s stolen innocence kindling a villages’ anger, an unjust trial, and a recalcitrant mob dragging a young man across frozen fields. Of a rope thrown high into the branches, of the screams and desperate protestations as a makeshift noose is placed around a neck. Of the cries replaced by a silence, broken only by the steady creaking of a rope, and the steady croaking of waiting crows hoping to break their inadvertent winter fast. Some say the body was buried beneath the tree when the frost thawed, the roots its only coffin, the trunk its only gravestone. But from then on, people avoided the horse chestnut, their guilt causing them to conjure up images of spectres seeking revenge and forget how they had once loved the tree and all it had given to them.
The story is seldom told now, only when the horse chestnut’s skeleton haunts the winter’s skyline, and a lone robin sings its maudlin wintry song from the bare boughs.
In the road, little branches of cracks have begun to appear. The horse chestnuts roots have begun to push upwards, fracturing the surface. When the rain freezes in the small gaps, it forces the cracks further outwards, the tree’s roots slowly signing its own death warrant. By next spring the holes will be large enough to cause the cars to bump and jolt. Complaints will be sent to the council who will fell the horse chestnut, branch by branch, till only a stump is left behind. The wood will be shredded, dumped, and left to decompose, an ungainly end for such an enduring tree.
But the worms and the centipedes will move in, and the beetles will come to lay their larvae amongst the fungi that grows in the damp, dark spaces. And in death, the tree will support life once again.
A home. A shelter. A larder. A playground. A gallows. A grave.
But the villagers don’t take much notice of the old horse chestnut tree anymore.