April 22nd

1876

Saturday 22 April
We came tumbling and plunging down the steep hillside of Moccas Park, slipping, tearing and sliding through oak and birch and fallow wood of which there seemed to be underfoot an accumulation of several feet, the gathering ruin and decay probably of centuries.

As we came down the lower slopes of the wooded hillside into the glades of the park the herds of deer were moving under the brown oaks and the billiant green hawthorns, and we came upon the tallest largest stateliest ash I ever saw and what seemed at first in the dusk to be a great ruined grey tower, but which proved to be the vast ruin of the king oak of Moccas Park, hollow and broken but still alive and vigorous in parts and actually pushing out new shoots and branches. That tree may be 2000 years old. It measured roughly 33 feet round by arm stretching.

I fear those grey old men of Moccas, those grey, gnarled, low-browed, knock-kneed, bowed, bent, huge, strange, long-armed, deformed, hunchbacked, misshapen 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 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.

Rev. Francis Kilvert
Robert Francis Kilvert (3 December 1840–23 September 1879), diarist and Rcetor, was born near Chippenham, Wiltshire, His diaries, reflecting rural life in the 1870s, were first published over fifty years after his death.