The ancient oak wood of the Robin Hood stories, home to the vast old Major Oak and hundreds of veteran trees
Sherwood Forest is the wood everyone half-knows already from the Robin Hood stories, and the real place is a National Nature Reserve of a few square kilometres near Edwinstowe in Nottinghamshire. What survives here is a remnant of the old royal hunting forest, and its great glory is the oaks: hundreds of ancient and veteran trees, some of them many centuries old, gnarled and hollow and still going. Between them the ground is heath and grassland, and the dead and dying timber makes it one of the best places in Britain for beetles and other wood-loving insects.
The tree people make a beeline for is the Major Oak, an enormous old oak deep in the wood with a huge spreading crown held up on props. Legend has it Robin Hood and his men sheltered inside its hollow trunk. You cannot go up to the trunk itself now, since it is fenced to protect the roots, but the paths bring you right alongside it.
The walking is flat and easy, on a network of paths spreading out from a visitor centre near the main entrance, so it suits families and there is no need for boots in dry weather. The Robin Hood Way long-distance path passes through, and the village of Edwinstowe with its old St Mary’s Church, where Robin is said to have married Maid Marian, is a short walk to the south. For more of the same the parkland at Clumber is close by to the north.
