Planting Plan 1948

Century Clump

This is a scrap of paper glued onto a piece of old cardboard, annotated in red and black ink. It is very easy to lose or discard it; extremely easy to overlook it. What it records can be passed by just as easily. Indeed, so used are we to the landscape around us, to the trees, the paths, the pitches that every golfer playing on Radley College Golf Course, every visitor for a school match, every dog-walker and every member of the College, has walked past this with barely a thought. Yet its purpose is grandiose, ambitious, permanent: a grove of eighteen oak trees each planted to commemorate that greatest of cricketing targets – to score a century in a school match. In thirty-seven years only thirteen boys achieved it. This is the planting plan for Century Clump. … The full story