Mighty Oaks from little acorns grow

“You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and liveable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be.”
Toni Morrison
The recollection of a day intent on visiting ‘man’ made buildings is dominated by an altogether more incredible structure, younger than the older buildings I visited but equally dominant in the landscape. The Oak stands behind a levee (on top of which is The Severn Way footpath) on the banks of the Severn (or Hafren/Sabrina), a reminder that the surrounding fields are used by the river as overspill, much as the Egyptian Nile once flooded and fertilised the adjoining land during the natural monsoon cycle upstream. There was a ‘tide mark’ of debris in the fields so they had been flooded recently. The levee is shown on the 1883 O.S. map for Deerhurst, with the cautionary “Liable to Flooding” alongside – so nothing new there. But the map doesn’t show the tree, despite showing several others that are no longer there. Curious, I’d have thought the tree a few hundred years old judging by its girth. An early memory (or myth?) I have is of returning from a family holiday in Evesham; my father driving the family car – us kids crammed in the back, no seat belts in those days - through the flooded streets of nearby Tewkesbury, and later Newport, on our way home. It seemed the family car was more amphibious craft on that journey. Curious to establish whether my recollection was memory or myth, I looked online and found “Tewkesbury is synonymous with flooding”, so the chances are it was a memory.