Sidney’s Oak at Penshurst

An oak was said to have been planted at Penshurst on the day Sir Philip Sidney was born, and it grew to more than twenty feet round before it was felled, by mistake it was said. Ben Jonson, Waller and Southey all wrote of it. The people of the neighbourhood called it the bare oak. Tradition said that when the tenants went to the park gates, as was their custom, to meet the Earls of Leicester on their visits, they decked their hats with boughs from this tree, and its hollow trunk held a seat for five or six people.