Burning red the hawthorn brings to mind moots and magic rituals

By custom, felling a hawthorn was thought to bring bad luck, so lone trees in the landscape may be very old. Photograph: Maria Nunzia/@Varvera

The hawthorn stands on Windmill Hill between Much Wenlock and Shadwell quarry. In the low November sun the tree glows blood red. Its berries, haws, crowd thick on its boughs and shine like little apples. There is no other tree in the area so laden with fruit, so vivid and so prominent in the landscape. Its shape is dense and squat, and it stands apart on the crest of the hill.

The hawthorn may be as old, if not older, than the stone tower of the windmill, which was first mentioned in local records in 1714 and which stopped like a clock when struck by lightning in 1850.

In old myths hawthorns were believed to have been seeded by lightning, and fires of hawthorn wood burned in magic rituals, weddings and funerals from ancient Greece to Scandinavia.

The wood also made the blocks used for chopping off heads. In many rural cultures it was considered deeply unlucky to cut down a hawthorn, and lone trees scattered around the countryside are much older than they appear.

It is possible that a special hawthorn grew on this hill hundreds of years ago and that it was a meeting place. Hawthorns marked moots, or assemblies to decide issues of local importance and manorial courts. This one may still be a moot point something arguable, undecided, contested, its original function lost generations ago.

Older than living memory, this tree or the one it is descended from, is as full of secrets as it is berries. Hawthorns that stand out like this one have been associated with the underworld and its supernatural inhabitants, the fairies, pixies and elves. At the moment the meadow on the hill is inhabited by bright yellow waxcap mushrooms, which also seem supernatural.

Burning bright red on this little hill of Wenlock limestone, the hawthorn draws the imagination into such a place of wonders. It waits to be used to drive out evil spirits, protect babies and houses, cure rheumatism, warts and toothache. It has waited a long time. But perhaps without all the symbolism and superstition it is free to be itself and waits, as it has every year, to be feasted on by birds.

Twitter: @DrPaulEvans1

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Burning red the hawthorn brings to mind moots and magic rituals