COLCHESTER’S “champion” oak tree is growing somewhere, on public ground, and waiting to be found.

I’d like to start a competition to find the biggest and oldest in the borough, so start exploring your neighbourhood.

Send a photo of yourself with your entry and tell us your tree’s girth in feet.

From that measurement, you can estimate its age using the calculator on the Woodland Trust site.

My entry is pictured here, blanketed in snow.

It stands beside a footpath, just an eight-minute bike ride plus two-minute walk from Colchester Town Hall.

If you can find it and think it’s the champion, send it in.

Maybe there’s an even older veteran which someone else will discover.

Why should it be an oak tree?

They are our oldest British trees, surpassed only by yew trees, which do it by a good margin.

The Fortingall Yew, in a churchyard in Perthshire, is about 2,500 years old, while the oldest oak, the Bowthorpe, in Lincolnshire, has a waistline of 43 feet, but that equates to only 1,000 birthdays.

The largest oak in north Essex is Old Knobbly at Mistley.

It’s about 800-years-old and is said to be where women denounced as witches hid to escape drowning and burning.

The Honywood Oak, in Marks Hall, is runner-up.

“From little acorns mighty oak trees grow”, mighty enough to be worshipped by the druids for their many uses in providing shelter, timber, acorns for grinding into flour and for fattening up the swine.

The height of our splendid oaks gave the British navy an advantage in mast height and sail area so many battle ships, as well as pubs, have been called the Royal Oak.

Every oak is a tower block for millions of inhabitants, from fungi at the root tips to birds singing from the summit.

However, it’s greatest value to biodiversity is when it has passed its prime and starts to recycle into its surroundings.

The decaying tree supports more life than when it was in the peak of health.

Gruesome-sounding conditions like heart rot, along with branch drop, bark lift and hole development, create new habitats for colonisation.

When only the stump is left, the stump-eating specialists move in, including the impressive stag beetle.

Everyone knows that trees are an important way of removing carbon from the atmosphere.

Before the Battle of Hastings, the Bowthorpe oak was sucking in carbon dioxide to create its woody skeleton and releasing oxygen and water vapour into the air.

To combat climate change, we need to restore as many suitable areas of the UK as we can to woodland, both by planting and natural rewilding.

In so doing, we will reset the balance of the natural world which is exactly what Sir David Attenborough has been pleading for, along with begging governments, to stop burning down the rain forests.

In the process, we will create awesome oaks for our descendants to marvel at a thousand years from now.

For their part in this, we will, surprisingly, have today’s jays to thank for planting the oak forests of the future.

  • Send your entry in by March 20 to matt.plummer@newsquest.co.uk

If your oak tree is the oldest in the borough, you will win my prize and £40 will be yours.