The Oak of the Hunenborg

The tree worth walking to here is the one the register mentions last. Four oaks stand at the Hunenborg, banded 1870 to 1880, and as a group they are handsome enough. Then the register adds that the special one is a different tree, standing behind hunebed D4, which already appears on old paintings and looks genuinely older than the four. Nobody has given that oak a coordinate of its own, so the pin here marks the site rather than the trunk. Go round behind D4 and look for the heavier tree. The ground beneath it works on another scale. Hunebed D3 was built between 3400 and 3100 BCE by the people of the Funnel Beaker culture, who dragged glacial boulders into a chamber and covered them with an earth mound. D4 stands beside it, and the pair together are the Hunenborg. Five thousand years against a couple of hundred: the oaks are recent arrivals on this spot, and nothing about the tomb makes them older than they are. What the oaks do is make the tombs read properly. A hunebed with veteran oaks standing over it looks like what it is, a burial place nobody ploughed out, and this one lies just south of Midlaren, open ground at any hour.