Robin Hood never did this, I think, as I clamber onto the steel platform of one of those hoists known in the trade as cherrypickers, in what used to be Sherwood Forest. The crooked steel limb begins to straighten and we make a jerky ascent. Up we go, past birds’ nests and bat roosts. Controlling my ascension is Gordon Hodgkinson, a woodsman of 40 years’ experience, whose long grey beard would give him an unsporting advantage in an Ancient Mariner lookalike contest. We have left the lower branches of a spreading sweet chestnut behind and – jolt, bump – here we are looking down on its crown. I am a bird sailing above the tree tops. Or I would be if both sets of knuckles weren’t clutched convulsively around the bar of the cage to prevent myself ending it all by jumping out. The cherrypicker reaches the limit of its extent and we stop, like a couple of medieval anchorites at the top of a pole. “It’s beautiful,” rhapsodises Gordon, gazing through saucer-sized spectacles. “I never tire of it. All the different trees, the different colours. Beautiful.”

If we were to rise further (and I am glad Gordon hasn’t hired the 100ft version, because there is one) it would give us a view of the whole forest, miles and miles of it. Part of it can be visited: the Sherwood Forest Country Park, which contains some of the country’s most famous oak trees. But covering 450 acres, this is only a tiny fraction of the forest known to King John. The original Sherwood stretched from just south of Sheffield to Nottingham.

Over the centuries, what was originally a royal hunting preserve has been carved up and served out. In the 18th century, Sherwood turned into the Dukeries, the name inspired by the landed estates and country houses that lie cheek by jowl on land parcelled out from the forest. The noble families grew rich on the coal that lay under their feet. Pit workings, black and angular, haunted the landscape like evil spirits. Villages grew into coal towns, with uniform streets of pinched miners’ housing. The dukes left their palaces, pulling down Clumber Park and half of Rufford Abbey. The Dukeries found itself in the gutter.

People forgot that Sherwood Forest had once occupied two-thirds of Nottinghamshire. The BBC series of Robin Hood was shot in Hungary. In beech woods. The indignity of it. Some of the old Sherwood survives in patches. There are commercial plantations and grand landscape features like the Lime Avenue at Thoresby – where Gordon has erected his cherrypicker. But these fragments no longer add up to being a forest. They could do, and a consortium of foresters, naturalists and landowners under the banner of Sherwood: the Living Legend has plans that they should. By joining up the dots, one of the most famous forests in the world could recapture its identity.

Sherwood Living Legend is one of the finalists, out of an initial field of 33, hoping to snaffle £50m of lottery-fund money being distributed – for the first time for a sum of this size – by public vote. The Black Country wants to change its image by developing an urban park, accessible by 1m people around Dudley in the West Midlands. A bid from Sustrans, called Connect2, seeks to improve walking and cycling in 79 different communities. The already hugely popular and successful Eden Project in Cornwall hopes to fund the next stage of its evolution in the Edge: a new dome “where communities and families will be able to share the best ideas they have for improving their lives and environments, both now and in the future”.

Sherwood Living Legend’s ambition is to scrap the existing visitor centre at Sherwood Forest Country Park and replace it with a spectacular 100ft-tall structure in the form of a tree on a new site. This will not only provide a viewing platform, to save people like me going up in a cherrypicker, but will also reduce the footfall around the ancient oaks. It is, they say, part of a 500-year plan to preserve the forest, not least by planting an area equivalent to the size of 400 football pitches with oaks grown from acorns collected from forest trees. A 250-kilometre network of cycle-ways will be created, with new road and river crossings.

On December 3, ITV will begin showing the first of a series of programmes about what is being called The People’s £50 Million Lottery Contest, the case for each project being argued by a celebrity presenter. Toyah Willcox fronts the Black Country Urban Park, Ray Mears hymns the wonders of Eden, Lorraine Kelly leaves the sofa to praise Sustrans’s Connect2 plans, and Brian Blessed makes an impassioned plea for Sherwood’s oaks. Mindful of recent votathon scandals, the lottery fund emphasises that premium phone lines will not be used, and the Electoral Reform Society has been called in to ensure fair play. But stand by for fireworks. With £50m at stake, the result is bound to be controversial – and there are already mutterings about the advantage the frontrunner, the Eden Project, has over its rivals, having already won £55m from the lottery through the Millennium Commission, which has enabled it to build up a database of potential supporters. Sherwood’s resources are meagre by comparison. But could anywhere be a bigger symbol of Britain?

If you want to know about the history of Sherwood, come and interrogate the Major Oak. It is the biggest living organism in Britain, an immense, squat sumo wrestler of a tree, its 33ft girth suggestive of the days when gentlemen drank three bottles of port after dinner and had stomachs to match. Much of the interior is hollow now, forming a chamber big enough for the entire England rugby team to squeeze inside. Twenty feet above me, a few tiny spangles of light penetrate a skin that, in parts, is only bark. Outside, senescent limbs rest on padded steel crutches to stop them collapsing under the weight of their own years. The gouty carapace is a mass of boles, warts and crevices. And yet the ancient being is still alive. It puts forth leaves in spring, and last year a thousand volunteers came to collect its acorns at the end of the summer. There were no acorns this year – it was a bad year – and the helpers gathered saplings instead. But the old man (it is difficult not to be anthropomorphic) is still so fertile that hundreds of his progeny, tiny as yet, can be seen pushing their slender way through the mulch of wood chip around him. The girth of the tree is increasing, too. The opening to the hollow core used to be as big as a doorway. Now it has narrowed to little more than a slit. The iron manacles that fastened around its limbs in 1900 – part of a system of props to support what was a celebrity tree even then – are now sunk into the bark, like rings on a fat woman’s hand.

In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Prince Andrei comes across an old oak – “an enormous tree, double a man’s span, with ancient scars where branches had long ago been lopped off and bark stripped away. With huge ungainly limbs sprawling unsymmetrically, with gnarled hands and fingers, it stood, an aged monster, angry and scornful, among the smiling birch trees”. The Major Oak may have been alive in the reign of King John in the 12th century. It may have been nothing more than a sapling; it may have been as imposing as the tree Tolstoy describes. Dendrologists can only say that it is between 800 and 1,200 years old. You can’t count the rings of a hollow tree. But its gargantuan form is evidence of how its surroundings must have looked. Like Tolstoy’s tree, the oak is, these days, surrounded by birches. Birch springs up like a weed and is regarded as little better than one by commercial foresters. But the Major Oak spent its youth in open parkland. It had the space to throw out huge branches and a billowing green canopy.

When Paul Cook, now 40, was a boy, you could climb over the oak; his grandfather took pictures of him doing so. Now he is one of very few people who can still experience that sort of contact with this venerable being: as the senior ranger of Sherwood Forest National Nature Reserve, he is responsible for looking after it. “There used to be vast areas of open sandy heathland or open rough grassland in Sherwood Forest,” he says. North of the Country Park, Budby Common survives from those ancient heaths – saved from becoming a carrot field by the MoD, which used to use it for tank training (it is now subject to the right to roam). “It’s a popular misconception that medieval forests were densely planted with trees, like the Forestry Commission’s plantations today. But they were kept for hunting. To hunt, they used horses. They had to have spaces to gallop.”

The forests were ruled by special laws, imposing hideous Norman punishments like blinding or chopping the hands of those who interfered with the king’s “vert and venison” – timber and undergrowth, deer and wild boar. Peasants had to lame their dogs by chopping off the toes of one paw if they wanted to keep them in the forest. Edwinstowe Church still contains a stone that supposedly marked out a “forest measure” – forest feet being several inches longer than ordinary feet.

“We’d have been able to stand here and look around and see all the oaks about here,” says Paul. For the Major Oak is not alone in this forest: there are over 1,000 other oaks that are more than 300 years old. You can still see them amid the birch trees – “We couldn’t clear-fell the birch: the oaks now need their protection.” They are scarred, pendulous, callused or weirdly misshapen. One – the Bee Oak, so called because bees always nest – lopsidedly extends a disproportionately vast limb that twists like an eel. It is a satisfying statistic that there are more veteran oaks in Sherwood Forest than in the whole of France and Germany put together.

There are veteran oaks in Richmond Park, Windsor Great Park and elsewhere. Most were pollarded in early life. Pollarding is the technique by which the crown of the tree is cut off above the browsing height of deer to encourage young shoots to grow. The shoots provided poles for making fences, furniture and light buildings. The life of the tree was prolonged by stunting its growth. But the Sherwood oaks were able to grow freely. For some unknown reason, they escaped felling during the centuries when oak was at a premium – maybe their age was revered even then. But a harvest seems to have been taken from them, all the same. Medieval carpenters and the shipwrights of Nelson’s navy needed specially shaped timbers for cathedral roofs and ships’ hulls; curved boughs could provide them. It’s been suggested that branches were tied to the ground to encourage bends. But again the trees have probably lived longer as a result.

The sculptor Richard James has been working in Sherwood Forest for several years. The country park needed signboards and waymarkers that would reflect the organic character of the surroundings, and James has carved 60 pieces out of – what else? – oak. “To compete with the natural grandeur of the oaks would be silly,” he reflects. “I wanted to make pieces that would encourage people to see in the trees what I’d seen.” He points to a stump like an elephant’s foot, the twists in the wood showing the huge compression it was under. Increasingly, the trees are becoming sculptures. Because like everything else that reaches a ripe age, they are dying.

That figure of over 1,000 ancient trees is in fact a wee bit misleading. According to Paul Cook, “About 400 of them are totally dead.” It isn’t, however, something that fills him with dismay. “While an oak tree can sustain over 600 different types of insects when it’s alive, a dead one is home to more than that. Insects feed off them. Nuthatches and bats nest in their nooks and crannies.” Like crafty old men, the veteran oaks have lived too long to be impressed by sudden freaks of nature, such as the high winds earlier this year. Few of them were among the 200,000 trees that were brought down. But sometimes they keel over by themselves.

We pass one whose hollow trunk has rotted away so completely that only a hinge of greenwood connects the tree’s superstructure to its base. “The interior was like a fireplace – in fact, some kids did set fire to it.” The foresters were waiting for it to go, and the inevitable happened in May. Even now, the life force is not entirely extinct. The hinge did not break when the tree crashed, providing a narrow conduit through which nutrients can travel from the roots. It was enough to make leaves. “The tree might just have enough energy in it to sprout,” says Paul. “It would probably kill itself, though, if it did.” It will be left where it is, a memorial and a five-star hotel for Sherwood’s 1,500 species of beetle.

Even more welcoming to wildlife are the ancients who combine deadwood (sufficiently soft not to give a woodpecker a headache) and living tissue (which can easily be invaded by parasites). Species such as the endangered leaf beetle, Cryptocephalus querceti, live in rotting deadwood but need at one point in their life cycle to feed on growing leaves. Others make their home in fungi. The rarest false scorpion in Britain (false because it is really a spider), Dendrochernes cyrneus, lives under the bark of Sherwood’s veterans. It is another reason to care for these dendrological old folk. The object, explains Paul, is not officiously to keep them alive so much as “reversing the damage man has done to it”. The root system of the Major Oak, for example, must be protected from the trampling of human feet – half a million pairs a year. Every so often, compressed air is blasted into the compacted soil to open cavities through which nutrients can be absorbed. Regular tests are performed to ensure that the tree has enough zinc, sulphur and magnesium. Like people, trees can suffer stress. Unlike people, they can show it by unexpectedly shedding a limb.

If you know what to look for, you may see a herd of longhorn cattle swinging heavily between the trees. With their dappled hides, they can look remarkably like a pile of birch logs from a distance. But they come to Tony Tapper, who looks after them, when he rattles a bucket of feed. Tony used to be farm manager on Thoresby Estates but is now a conservation adviser, managing around 70 longhorns, whose main role is to control the bracken that invaded the forest after commercial grazing fell off in the 20th century. It is now apt to form a dense carpet of undergrowth beneath which little can survive. Spraying the bracken with herbicide would be one solution, but the herbicide could find its way into tree roots. The longhorns simply trample the bracken, and roll on it when they sleep.

Tony takes me in his Nissan 4x4 to see Thoresby Estates, and we pass part of a railway that survives from the second world war. The forest, away from any centre of population, was used as an ammunition dump. Thoresby still has a pithead, one of two in the county. But 30 or so others have gone. When I first visited Thoresby Hall in the late 1970s, that assemblage of

neo-Elizabethan towers and finials was still a private house, occupied by the elderly Countess Manvers. Then it was acquired by the National Coal Board, which mined underneath it; it was nearly demolished. Now it has risen again as a Warner Leisure Hotel, and looks as smart as it ever did. But the land around it is subject to shifts in level, as the seams that were removed suddenly settle, swallowing up whole tractors, according to one forester. What you don’t see are the spoil heaps, as big as hills, that were formed out of the guts of the Earth, dragged out of the mines along with the coal. They have been flattened and landscaped into places such as Boundary Wood, part of the Blidworth colliery site and now a community woodland.

John Wood has a good name for his job. He began work in the mines; now, in his sixties, he is a ranger for the Forestry Commission. He cannot resist rustling his feet through chestnut leaves as he shows me his domain. Trees do not grow very well on the old waste heaps, now recontoured into a lake and banks. But he can catalogue the wild flowers – orchids, harebells, viper’s bugloss, St John’s wort, black knapweed – that have colonised it. “This is a rare place for skylarks in the summer,” he says. Not everyone is appreciative, to judge from the graffiti sprayed on the signboards. But the schoolchildren he takes round respond to his stories about the ash tree, once used to cure warts (“They’d stick a pin into the bark, then into the wart; they thought it was magic but it was the quinine that did it”).

As well as mining, the forest was used during the 20th century for, well, forestry. Along came the Forestry Commission with its stands of Scots pine and Norway spruce, 2,500 acres of them at Sherwood Pines. I meet Simon James, forest works supervisor in the Forestry Commission’s new headquarters in Sherwood Pines, an almost carbon-neutral building heated by wood chips. At 26, Simon is that rather rare creature, a young forester, with responsibility for the “south beat” that stretches from here to Nottingham. “The best stuff can be made into veneers for furniture-making,” he explains. “Very straight timber with few knots in it goes for construction. But the biggest market is firewood – it’s the biggest use of timber on the planet.” But increasingly, there is another crop to be harvested from forests: tourism. Go Ape has erected a network of high-level walkways through part of Sherwood Pines. A “centre of excellence for cycling” is being developed. Father Christmas will be supervising the sale of eco-friendly Christmas trees. So what used to be a commercial forest, dedicated to growing timber as a national resource, has become Sherwood Pines Forest Park, visited by a quarter of a million people a year. CenterParcs, with its “subtropical swimming paradise”, abseiling and spa treatments, is hidden away in another area of Sherwood Forest next door.

Oaks are being planted at Sherwood Pines. They have been grown from acorns collected from the Major Oak. One day the Major Oak and its fellow ancients will rot back into the soil out of which they grew, and the saplings will by then be young trees, ready – after a few centuries – to take on its mantle. “Sherwood Forest is fading away,” laments Austin Brady, the Forest Commission’s regional director for the East Midlands and chair of the Sherwood Living Legend project. “This ancient forest is now but a shadow of its former self, but we have a real opportunity to bring it back from the brink.” While every primary-school child is taught about the vulnerability of the Amazon rainforest, there is, he believes, a “real danger” that Britain’s most famous forest could deteriorate through neglect and fragmentation. Although the 600 acres of the Sherwood Forest Country Park and Budby Common have been designated a European Special Area of Conservation – the highest category of protection that can be awarded in Europe – the forest lacks “the scale needed to withstand the pressures of the 21st century”. Among them are likely to be the tempestuous downpours and the host of new parasites brought by climate change.

Pete Bakewell, located in the Old Laundry of the Welbeck estate, keeps another aspect of the Robin Hood tradition alive. A local man, he makes longbows that are bought by archers across Britain and further afield. “Mention Sherwood Forest to anyone in Europe and they will know exactly where you are,” he says. Sherwood’s fame may do it some favour when votes are cast for the People’s £50 Million. If the Living Legend bid wins, the whole of Britain will be able to take pride in the revival of its ancient heart of oak. There is much talk about Britishness these days, not least from the prime minister. Is there a better hero for the age – one untarnished by militarism, colonialism or political parti pris – than Robin Hood?

Clive Aslet is editor at large of Country Life

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