Thoughts of Trees

Trees are the oldest living things on earth and we have many magnificant specimens alongside our off-road paths.
What tales they could tell if they could speak, and what a wonderful insight into times of yore that would be.
This veteran oak tree stands alongside the Great Northern Greenway (NCN Route 54) at Mickleover and is about 300 years old. It would have been an sprouting acorn in 1711.
How amazing that it has remained undisturbed over the years, in spite of being struck by lightning a few times, and the invention of the chainsaw.
The world would have been very different in those days.
George the First was on the throne of England  and this tree would have been over 100 years old when Queen Victoria acceded to the throne at the age of 18 in 1837.
Mickleover, now a substantial suburb of Derby, was then a small outlying village where many of it's inhabitants would have been employed as farm labourers in the surrounding countryside. For most people transport was by foot, on horseback or by horse-drawn coach. How amazed those people would be to see what we take for granted - the bicycle, the motor car and the aeroplane. To them these things would have been rocket science (assuming that they knew what a rocket was).
In the late 1870's the Great Northern Railway came along and the newly constructed line was laid within a few feet of our oak tree, then about 160 years old. The railway revolutionised the transport of goods and passengers, farmers were able to send food and animals anywhere in the country by rail, and people were able to travel to far-away places such as Skegness, 90 miles distant, many seeing the sea for the first time.
For over 100 years this tree would have seen the passage of  trains until the Beeching Cuts in the 1960's, with consequential closure of the line, followed by 30 years of dereliction until Derbyshire County Council and Sustrans came along with conversion of the trackbed into a stretch of the National Cycle Network.
On the Great Northern Greenway we have many other trees of interest. Where bridges were built crossing the railway line, decorative pine trees were planted at the request of local landowners over whose land the railway passed. They insisted that the bridges should be hidden from their gaze and did not like the idea of rail passengers being able to see their palatial properties. A large earth bank was built alongside Etwall Hall to block the view of the grounds.
These pine trees at each of the bridges are there to this day, and have grown to a considerable height. They are now about 160 years old.

Long may they remain.