The ancient trees in Moccas Park

‘I fear those grey old men of Moccas,

those grey, gnarled, low-browed, knock-kneed, bowed,

 bent, huge, strange, long-armed, deformed,

 misshapened oak men that stand waiting and watching

 century after century biding God’s time with both feet in

the grave and yet tiring down and seeing out generation

after generation, with such tales to tell, as when they

 whisper them to each other in the midsummer nights,

 make the silver birches weep and the poplars and aspens

 shiver and the long ears of the hares and rabbits stand

 on end. No human hand set those oaks.

They are ‘the trees which the Lord hath planted’.

They look as if they had been at the beginning and

 making of the world, and they will probably see its end.’


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