Hitchin Nub News aims to support our community, promoting shops, businesses, charities, clubs and sports groups.

We profile some of these businesses and organisations regularly in a feature called 'Up Close in Hitchin' while also encouraging opinion pieces from our readers and trusted contributors.

Here's the popular Sparky with his unique take on our town and surrounding areas

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As we enter the second week of the current lockdown, we can take some comfort from the fact that Mother Nature seems to be doing her best to lighten our load yet again: following on from the balmy days of our gorgeous spring and early summer it now looks like we have also been gifted the most glorious autumn for years.

But don't worry, I'm not about to suggest that you get out and about as you're almost certainly doing that already.

But what I am going to do is to ask you to look again at those familiar places when you go wandering; zoom in, hunt for the unexpected in those everyday views, see and feel everything afresh if you can. Surprise yourself.

And sometimes you don't even need to look- you can use all of your other senses to experience some other details and then reap the benefits.

A London-based friend recently commented on how many oaks we have in this area, but I must admit that I'd never felt particularly over-oaked.

However, I do consider myself quite observant so what had actually happened here?

Had the London plane successfully completed its total takeover of the capital's treescape?

Have I become inured to the oak's over representation in our own countryside and gardens?

Had familiarity bred contempt?

The answer is possibly 'yes' to all of these questions but either way I had certainly not seen the tree for the woods.

So, I felt it time for me to leap into action and reacquaint myself with this English classic via a visit to my own favourite local oak.

And I needed to follow my own advice and see it anew, experience it differently and all that…

The Pedunculate or English oak (Quercus robur) is just one of hundreds of oak species that live in the northern hemisphere.

Long-living, sturdy and massive they have had a long and successful association with man due to the excellence of the timber for building both houses and ships, together with other uses.

But our relationship with the English oak goes far deeper than just the practical and the economic- it is an unusually totemic and spiritual tree, embedded in both the national psyche and heart.

And although the name 'English' oak primarily refers to its geographical spread in the UK- it prefers the slightly lower and drier areas, leaving the damper and higher ground to its close relative, the Sessile Oak (Quercus patraea)- the name has certainly assumed some additional emotional weight too.

David Garrick's words to the Royal Navy's official march 'Hearts of Oak', premiered in 1760, also reflect this deep-rooted bond so it appears that there's always been more to this relationship than just the timbers of the warship's hull.

The druids, those pre-Christian guardians of the nation's spiritual soul, derived their name from the Celtic for 'knower of the oak tree'.

And long before those jack tars lustily belted out Garrick's lyric our woad-loving chums were venerating the sturdy oak's wisdom and longevity, holding meetings in the shade of its canopy and reverentially climbing its upper boughs to cut down holy mistletoe with golden scythes.

This reverence endured, with many oaks being subsequently used as places of worship by Christian preachers – just count the number of 'Gospel Oaks' in this country.

Even younger and smaller English oaks are a thing of beauty but for the truly druidic 'wow factor' we do need to look to the older, larger and more grizzled specimens.

We are fortunate to have several such trees in our area and an easily accessible example is to be found, incongruously, on a housing estate in Great Offley.

The Great Oak sits by the pavement in Salusbury Lane and thanks to a rather good information board we know that this split-trunk whopper is at least 400 plus years old.

You can almost feel the history ooze from this stout fellow, and it was likely to have been just a wee sapling as James I of England took to the throne. No wonder it is so loved and protected.

To the Woodland Trust, my own favourite oak is simply known as 'Veteran Tree ID 61078', but this simple label can never do it justice.

It is to be found next to a footpath near Stagenhoe on the outskirts of Preston (nat. grid ref TL182227). I have known it for years and as you approach it from round a corner it is its huge, bulbous gnarled trunk that stops you dead in your tracks.

And it is only then that your eyes are guided upwards to admire its veteran crown, spreading tens of metres above your head.

Last Saturday, in the glorious late autumn sunshine, my eager assistant and I visited again, this time armed with a tape measure.

The following slapstick struggle to measure the trunk's circumference (roughly six metres) then allowed me to age the tree using an arcane formula.

The approximate result of 400 years or so means that this beauty probably shares a birth decade with its brethren some two miles distant in Offley. What they both must have seen over the centuries.

But, despite the fun of my less than scientific field work, the real benefit was more important than the unreliable statistic.

By spending some extra time and attempting to wrap my too-short tape measure around its girth I had inevitably got right up close to this benign giant; its deeply fissured grey bark scratched me, the scrubby lower growth attempted to poke me in the eye and my feet had repeatedly slipped trying to find a purchase on its huge base and I had been smiling all the way round.

I walked away from a familiar place having experienced something new and felt immeasurably better for it

The great outdoors and an English oak: a 'green prescription' indeed.