Oak of the Gate of the Dead

The Oak of the Gate of the Dead.

This chilling name refers to an ancient tree, just about standing, said to date back to the eleventh century, in the Ceiriog Valley. It was likely alive when the Battle of Crogen was fought around it back in 1165, when a large Anglo-Norman army was said to have been defeated (or at least hampered) by Welsh skirmishers. The dead were buried nearby in Offa’s Dyke, their graves still visible to a writer in 1697. The numbers killed and buried are not clear and remain disputed, but this tree is said to have been the last living witness to that ancient conflict. It stands where hundreds or possibly thousands of men left the physical world for the place of the dead; it marks the spot near which so many of their damaged corpses were hastily dumped in the ground, perhaps with some rudimentary priestly ritual.

Some object, or even a living person, will ‘witness’ your dying. It might be the green curtain flimsily shielding your hospital bed. It might be your dining room table and chairs as you lay on the floor, your heart no longer able to do its work. It might be friends and family, neatly gathering around wishing you well (or contemplating the likely clauses of your will), or it might be the overworked Lithuanian carer at the Home to which you have been sent. An oak tree bespeaks a more appealing set of surroundings, but the gates of death are a most daunting prospect regardless of the location from which you are dispatched to pass them. The Christian has little control over the ‘how’ and ‘when’, nor even of the ‘where from’, but the ‘where to’ has been taken care of. Christ Jesus defeated death at His resurrection, and has spent the last two millenia designing and preparing a more permanent home at which to receive us, and in which we shall never die again.