After a visit to Nottingham Castle Museum I was haunted by an epic, if obscure, essay in Romantic painting, Andrew McCallum’s The Major Oak . Sometime later while searching through images online I came across a photograph of a forlorn and abandoned steam engine. There seemed to me to be a psychological resonance between the two pictures, disparate though they were, and my discovery of the old pram, rhyming with the image of the locomotive, and playing off the visual complexity of the tree, drew the elegiac ensemble together. I found my own ancient tree, a hornbeam, on an estate near my home.