Robin Hood’s Oak Sherwood Forest, England 1908. The Major Oak is a growing English oak (Quercus robur) located near the settlement of Edwinstowe in the heart of Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, England. According to local folklore, Robin Hood’s shelter was where he and his merry men slept.
There are various theories as to why it grew so large and weirdly formed. The Major Oak was named one of the Midlands’ wonders in the 2005 television series Seven Natural Wonders. In July 2020, the tree was reported vandalized, with a three-foot chunk of bark broken off.
It weighs an estimated 23 tons, has a width of 33 feet (10 meters), a canopy of 92 feet (28 meters), and is about 800–1000 years old. In a 2002 survey, it was voted “Britain’s favorite tree”. In 2014, it was voted ‘England’s Tree of the Year’ by a public poll by the Woodland Trust. This immense tree is widely regarded as the UK’s second-largest oak tree, only surpassed by the massive Majesty Oak near Dover.
The Major Oak could result from multiple trees fusing as saplings, or it could have been pollarded. Pollarding is a tree management technique that allows foresters to produce more than one crop of timber from a single tree, causing the trunk to grow broad and thick. However, there is only minimal evidence to support this notion because no other trees in the region were pollarded.
How big is Sherwood Forest? It encompasses 424.75 hectares, surrounding Edwinstowe’s village and Thoresby Hall’s site. Its name comes from its position as Nottinghamshire’s (or sher) wood, which stretched into many neighboring counties (shires) and was bounded to the west by the East Derbyshire Forest and the River Erewash.
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