The Queen’s Oak, near Potterspury, Northamptonshire, card posted 20 May 1905.

This tree is said to mark the place where King Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville first met on 13 April 1464;  they married 18 days later.  Damaged by fire in 1994, the tree died 1997, at which time tests suggested that it was about 340 years old.  Its blackened remains were still visible in 2006, and a local women’s morris side, formed in the 1980s, uses ‘Queen’s Oak’ as its name.

Addendum:  My Garden, ‘an intimate magazine for garden lovers’, no.110, February 1943, quotes from ‘Trees’, a source which so far has not been identified: ‘The Queen’s Oak in Whittlewood Forest, in Northamptonshire, is the trysting tree at which Edward IV used to meet his future queen, Elizabeth Woodville, in 1464.  The tree still bears a lot of leaf, but the trunk is now hollow’.

Updated 27 November 2022.