Midsummer Oak – Animation, David Parker

This tree, believed to be over 300 years old, once had its own local folklore. Every year on Midsummer’s Eve it was said that skeletons would rise up from the ground and dance around the tree, pulling up their own bones until daybreak came. Apparently some people in Broadwater called it the Hanging Tree, which would make sense because if it was a tree where people were hanged, their bones might be buried at the foot of the tree. That could then lead to the rather grim idea of skeletons coming out of the ground.

I think folk imagination does tend towards the gruesome and melodramatic. I know my own mind does.

Because although we don’t believe in spirits and ghosts and things like that, a tree like that undoubtedly has a particular importance, doesn’t it? One man was supposed to have seen the skeletons rise up from the roots and do their dance as he passed by at midnight.

The person who identified the tree precisely to me was Wilf Page, who was the landlord of the Cricketers pub. His father had been the landlord before him, and his grandfather before that. So that was good enough for me.

If a story has been kept alive for generations and generations, it becomes real in a sense. Of course, Wilf Page could have got it wrong, or he might simply have decided that was the tree. Who knows? But we do know that it’s an old legend, and that tree fits the bill.