The Studley Green Shoe Tree

Back in 2006, on Christmas Eve, I visited a local curiosity and wrote about it on my old Colganology blog ... 

The uncharacteristic fogbanks that have engulfed the UK have provided some unexpected benefits. They may have caused air traffic chaos but, artistically, Britain looks great in the fog. Despite the best efforts of American film-makers who seem to believe that our country is permanently wreathed in smog (and that we all talk like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins) we don't really suffer serious foggage. Foggery. Fogginess. But recent unusual weather patterns and unseasonal temperatures have left the country wreathed in pea-soupery. So it's not so much a White Christmas this year as a Christmas you can't see; at least beyond 100 yards. 

But it does make for pretty pictures. Oh yes. 

I had to drive to Stokenchurch a couple of days ago to pick up food supplies for our various pets and as I passed through the village of Studley Green, I couldn't help noticing how picturesque the Shoe Tree was.  

Just outside the village is an ash tree that has pairs of shoes hanging from it like some kind of strange laced and leather fruit. The current tree is the third to have appeared on this stretch of road. The first fell down. The second was cut down by some vandal with a chainsaw. But the third one is still up and sprouting more and more footwear by the month. 

No one seems to know how the 'tradition' started, but many theories have been put forward ranging from an ancient fertility rite whereby a couple would tie one shoe each together by the laces and throw them into the branches of a tree, to a toll payment for travellers. Another story says that it commemorates a biker who lost his life on that stretch of road. Yet another, inevitably, is that hanging yur old trainers in a tree is somehow a signal to help aliens to land.  

Yes, I know. Sigh.

The tree became headline news last year (2005) when it became part of a £265,000 lottery sponsored investigation into the origin of certain customs. The origin wasn't discovered but the tree is now listed as a 'notable place' within the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (click here to read more).

Shoes trees are found elsewhere in the country and throughout the world. And, apparently, there is a bra tree somewhere near Oxford and a panties tree near Henley on Thames. I must go and look for them sometime. 

But there is another curious tree-based custom found here in Britain - money trees. In several wooded areas around the UK, passers-by have been stopping for decades (if not centuries), and meticulously hammering small denomination coins into the bark of old dead trees. The custom seems to be unique to Britain and most seem to be in and around Cumbria or Portmeirion, that curiously eccentric village in Wales where they filmed 1960s spy-fi series The Prisoner. According to an article by the BBC (read here), the practice might date back to the early 1700s in Scotland where ill people stuck florins into trees with the idea that the tree would take away their sickness.

Anyway, I decided that the fog provided me with a great photogenic opportunity to add my own pair of shoes to the tree. So I went home, found an old pair of boating pumps and headed back to get a bunch of shots, a few of which I include for your viewing pleasure