The trunk changed shape long ago, losing its centre and one side to become a one-dimensional ligneous wall. No one quite knows the exact age of this relic, but it is calculated not in decades, nor in centuries, but in millennia.



The late Duke of Buccleuch, who had a passion for trees, made a pilgrimage to see it shortly before his death. "I never cease to marvel at the fact that there is something living today that was three thousand or more years old at the time of the first Christmas," he told me.