Oak Grove

[Xenakis]

It was A.D. Adlington's third and least successful 801 A.S novel Breathe that perhaps first popularised the myth of an Oak Grove to a Bretonian audience. In Adlington's novel the protagonist Veleta, the outcasted wood spirit of the land of Ulidia, becomes atune to the fears of the Wood Goddess, who foretells of the destruction of all the beauty in Ulidia unless spirits of the wood maintain a more watchful stewardship; and through the will and the powers of the Wood Goddess, Veleta constructs a floating temple made of ancient oak so that the wood spirits can guard Ulidia from the skies whilst maintaining their connection to the earth.

Rumors of a real Oak Grove only started circulating years later but, like many things that skirt closely to fiction, the truth can get easily lost in the telling of a good story. Tales will be told in Bretonian bars of Oak Grove being the temple of the Gaian cult of the Tuatha de Danann where ancient pagan rituals that involve human sacrifice and frenzied narcotic fueled ceremonies occur. Others will tell of a great Bio-dome in which all know flora and fauna are preserved by ex Cambridge University scientist who had become disillusioned with cuts in their funding following the Gallic invasion. And of course everyone has an uncle or a mate of a mate that has been there, '...and you know what he told me buddy, he told me it was only a bleeding smugglers paradise, that's right, you name it buddy .... they got it all, .... run by smelly dreadlock hippies, ... and they are so smashed on gin and sin that they have no clue whats coming or going ....'

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