Measure twice - cut once!

"MEASURE TWICE CUT ONCE"

This page of this site is dedicated to (mostly) oak related literature, folklore and anything else fun. 

“The dusky, filmed, chestnut roof, braced and tied in by huge collars, curves and diagonals, was far nobler in design because more wealthy in material than nine-tenths of those in our modern churches.  .  . One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of either the church or the castle, its kindred in age and style, that the purpose which had dictated its original erection was the same with that to which it was still applied. Unlike and superior to either of those two typical remnants of mediaevalism, the old barn embodied practices which had suffered no mutilation at the hands of time.  .  .  the mind dwelt upon its past history, with satisfied sense of functional continuity throughout, a feeling almost of gratitude, and quite of pride, at the permanence of the idea which had heaped it up.  .  .  So the barn was natural to the shearers, and the shearers were in harmony with the barn”

Thomas Hardy – extract from ‘Far from the madding crowd’

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                      My Oak

has memory: it put the wind which shook

the sapling into the mass of its trunk;

it put the prevalence of weather

down the Hanter Hill into its weighted curve

across the skyline; that infestation

of caterpillars was remembered by the leaves

which contracted and thickened the next year.

It remembers the season, or at least the length

of darknesses which distinguish them:

our word is photoperiodism, but remember

is not the word, nor is it my oak although

I used to watch it every day, when

I lived across the field, watch it

Repond to everything, everything else.

 Jo Shapcott

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A Limerick about Steve

There once was an old tree called Steve,
Who as he grew lost his leaves,
They fell out like hair,
Leaving him bare,
That withered old oak tree called Steve

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