Bruce Tree

Someone lit a fire inside the trunk in May 2004, and the tree fell the same month. An oak that had stood somewhere between seven hundred and a thousand years, one of the oldest in Scotland, was destroyed deliberately in a matter of weeks.

It grew in the grounds of Strathleven House in Dunbartonshire, on an estate owned by Robert the Bruce as a young man, before he became King of Scotland. That ownership is what anchors the story. The further claim — that Bruce planted the tree himself — is reported as rumour, and the sources treat it as such rather than as record. By the early twenty-first century the trunk measured 8.8 metres in girth, about 29 feet, and the tree stood 5.5 metres high.

The connection between the oak and the Bruce was made by a local history society, the Strathleven Artizans, and it was the Artizans who took custody of the timber after the fire. Cutting up the trunk, members said they could see the face of the Bruce in the cross section. A petrified acorn was found in the wood.

What they did with the timber is the more remarkable part. The society planned to carve a heart from the oak and carry it to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem — an attempt to complete an errand that failed in 1330. One of the Bruce’s last requests was that his heart be taken there by his champion, James Douglas, Lord of Douglas, since the king had never managed to go on crusade himself. Douglas set out with it and was killed fighting the Moors at the Battle of Teba. The heart never arrived.

The rest of the timber became a throne. Working from a depiction of the king enthroned on his royal seal, John Donaldson and an expert from Historic Scotland spent eight years carving a replica, with four beast heads at the ends of the arms and clawed feet. Into it went yew from a tree at Elderslie, the birthplace of William Wallace, and ancient olive wood from Teba, where Douglas died. Three separate places, and three separate deaths, worked into one chair.

It was unveiled at Dunfermline Abbey by Andrew Bruce, 11th Earl of Elgin, and later displayed at the Bannockburn visitor centre during the Bannockburn Live event of 28 and 29 June 2014, marking seven hundred years since the battle. The tree is gone; the objects made from it have outlasted it, and now carry the story that the tree itself only ever held by reputation.