The Capon Tree, Jedburgh

A favourite part of the country for us is the Borders, particularly around Coldingham.   A few years ago, when returning from visiting my sister near Hull and Mary-Jane’s brother in Bedlington, near Newcastle, we decided to take a meandering route home over several days.    Along the way, something that struck me, in many of the small coastal villages and towns along the way was the continued prescence of the memory of “Black Friday” – The Eyemouth Disaster, 14 October 1881.   Ultimately we chanced on Coldingham and have been returning there and there-abouts several times.    On a recent trip earlier this year we came across the latest memorial to that disaster in the village of St Abbs;

 

A couple of days later we were heading home and decided to make a detour to see the Capon Tree in Jedburgh.    It had come up in the discussions that Ness, Suzanne and myself had been having and it was a great opportunity to view it first hand.

Apparently named from a corruption of the name of the Capuchin monks in the nearby abbey in Jedburgh, it stands by the main road and not far from the river Jed.   Among many notable local residents that it has outlived is James Hutton, the father of modern Geology.   Was he given that title because he discovered the Mother of all geological features on the farm he inherited from his father?   I’d seen pictures on tinternet and had thought it an impressive looking tree – perhaps 500 or so years old, it had been around when Shakespeare had written “Hamlet”; before humans looked at the stars through telescopes.

However, the pictures don’t really give you the scale of how big this tree is.   Even with a person standing beside it for comparison (me in this instance) it’s sheer size still doesn’t come over.

There have been attempts over the years to keep it upright (most noticeably concrete and telegraph poles) but to varying degres of success.

  

Obviously second hand telegraph poles – I somehow like the incongruity of the old cable clips still embedded in the once living trunk of a pine tree now serving a second use in it’s death.   Up close there are many delightful details like the small sapling (beech I think) growing on one of the oak’s limbs (yet more sylvan inter-connectedness) or the amazing textures and patterns of bark, moss and rot (not unlike some of the renderings from the Myst computer games).

  

And from thence to Glasgow and to bed.

Goodnight.