Capon Tree

Concrete, bricks and timber beams hold the Capon Tree together. A split runs down the middle of the trunk, and without that masonry the oak would have come apart years ago. The repairs are not disguised. They sit in plain view around a trunk about ten metres across, and in 2022 the tree was recorded as still growing.

It stands two miles south of Jedburgh, west of the A68, above the Jed Water where the small river has cut its course below soft sandstone cliffs. The tree is a sessile oak, and it is reckoned to be about a thousand years old, which would set its beginning somewhere around 1000 AD. That is an estimate rather than a count, and the sources offer it as one.

What makes it more than an old tree is what it is left over from. The Capon Tree is one of the last surviving trees of the ancient Jedforest, the wood that once ran across this part of the Borders and formed part of the Caledon Wood, the great northern forest. Almost everything else of that wood has gone. The usual explanation for why this oak did not go with it is a backhanded one: the trunk grew so distorted that the timber was no use for building ships, and a tree that could not be turned into anything was a tree nobody bothered to fell. It survived by being commercially worthless.

Its recent history is a series of interventions. In 2002 grants were given to fund work extending its life, and the same year the Tree Council named it one of the 50 Great British Trees, a list assembled to mark the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. It was reckoned among the top fifty trees in the United Kingdom that year. In 2024 it was placed in the top ten and shortlisted for Tree of the Year — more than two decades after the work that kept it standing long enough to be nominated.

The tie to Jedburgh is annual and unbroken. For seventy-five years the tree has been visited during the Jethart Callant’s Festival, the town’s riding of the marches, when the Callant is decorated with a sprig cut from it. That makes the Capon Tree a working part of the town’s calendar rather than a monument set aside from it, and it is the reason a tree held up by brickwork continues to matter locally in a way that its conservation status alone would not explain.

Trees are now being replanted across the Borders with the aim of renewing the Caledon Wood, taking in both Jedforest and Ettrick Forest. The Capon Tree is one of the few living pieces of the original that the new planting is meant to grow back towards.