Country diary: a mighty poplar brought down by old age and the revenge of the wind

Sandy, Bedfordshire: At the tree's base, an autopsy of its last seconds was written in splits, snaps, rips and a broken heart

When the last storm whipped through our valley it brought down the tallest tree on the river. An old Lombardy poplar, a spire without a church, it belonged to an age when planting poplars was popular. They were the leylandii of their day, for they shot up as fast as rockets and looked like them too. They were often grown in rows as windbreaks, though nobody much thought about old age and the wind's revenge.

For a day or so after, my eyes clawed at the air, looking for the absent shape of a tower that had been a crow's nest for a magpie, a labyrinth for tits, a cricked neck. I saw only a wooded ridge, some houses, and sky - so much sky that it snuffed out the memory. For a day or so only, passersby stopped to inspect the toppled giant, as they might view the corpse of a beached whale.