Between the raised roots of the Royal Oak, squeezed a small child, imagining Robin Hood had hidden there centuries afore
Where Are The Waterfalls In Sherwood Forest
I was eight years old when I squeezed into the Major Oak.
Not inside it, not properly. The trunk had a split — not wide enough for a grown person, barely wide enough for a determined child — where old acorns had lodged themselves and brown dried leaves had gathered over what must have been decades of autumns. It smelled of damp soil and something older than anything I had a word for. I got two branches up, pressed myself into that crack in the bark, and thought:
What if Robin Hood — athletic, lean, light on his feet — had done exactly this? What if the tree had been a different shape in his century, deeper in its hollows, more willing to shelter a fugitive? I probably knew, even at eight, that it wasn’t quite real. The same way you know about Father Christmas but choose, quite deliberately, to keep believing. Because the believing is the better option. Because wouldn’t it be lovely if.
I stood in that tree and thought about every child who had stood there before me. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. All thinking the same thought. All feeling that same pull of something just beyond the edge of fact. It felt, even then, like belonging to something.
I am fifty-five now. The Major Oak has its own walking sticks.
Great iron supports and timber crutches hold up branches that have grown too heavy for the ancient trunk to carry alone.
I thought about that recently, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or to feel something quieter than laughter.
I have my own walking sticks too, some days.
We’re getting on, the Major Oak and I. But we’re still here.
The Film That Started All This
I wasn’t planning to think about Sherwood Forest at all. It was an ordinary evening. Supper on the go. The television on in the background the way television sometimes is — present but not demanding — when a film caught the corner of my eye.
The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men. 1952. Disney. Richard Todd as Robin, with a jaw you could sharpen an arrow on and considerably better tights than most men could carry off.
I was hooked within minutes.
Friar Tuck thundered wisdom betwixt bites of supper.
Little John spake as though every sentence were a tavern oath.
Scarlet swaggered about like a man who had ne’er paid taxes in his life.
Maid Marion brought grace and courage in equal measure.
The Queen did speak with noble dignity.
And the Sheriff of Nottingham? A villain most foul, crooked, and magnificently dramatic.
Then came the Queen’s companion — her governess, I decided, because the word carries both warmth and authority — clearly at her wit’s end with someone dashing about at entirely the wrong moment. She turned from the window and announced, with magnificent theatrical despair:
I put down whatever I was doing and gave the television my full attention.
Because gad about. Because will-o’-the-wisp. Because the English language used to be so wonderfully, operatically disgruntled, and somehow we have ended up with literally and whatever and I think we should take a moment to mourn that.
The Language of Sherwood
The film overflows with it. Lines you would never hear in a modern cinema, delivered with complete sincerity by people in extraordinary costumes atop very patient horses:
- “Forsooth!”
- “Lo!”
- “Thou knave!”
- “Aye!”
- “Methinks!”
- “By my troth!”
- “Have at thee!”
- “Villain!”
- “Good morrow!”
- “Nay, not whilst I draw breath!”
Modern cinema giveth explosions. The bluebells that draped the forest floor are still there today, as descendants self replicating across the decades.
Old cinema gaveth men in tights delivering threats beside suspiciously shallow brooks.
And honestly? I loveth both.
And Then I Noticed The Waterfall
Near the film’s ending, the camera moved through the forest and there it was: a tiny woodland waterfall. Not a mighty cataract. Not Niagara. Just a little silver ribbon of water tumbling prettily through the trees, catching the light, looking thoroughly romantic and entirely at home in Sherwood Forest.
And something in the back of my mind — something that had sat a Geography O Level at the Brunts School in Mansfield and actually paid attention — stirred quietly and said:
Why Sherwood Forest Does Not Actually Have Waterfalls
The real Sherwood Forest sits upon sandstone bedrock and soft sandy soil. The terrain is broad, gently sloping, and comparatively flat — not rugged, not dramatic, not the kind of landscape that sends water tumbling off ledges in photogenic cascades.
For a proper waterfall, you need two things working together: a significant change in gradient, and resistant rock that refuses to erode at the same rate as softer rock beneath it. That combination creates the drop. That combination creates the drama.
Sherwood, geologically speaking, is not in the business of drama.
It is in the business of quiet. Of soft ground underfoot, the whisper of bracken fiddles and the damp, overpowering scent of Sunday morning bluebell blooms.
Of brooks that meander, eddies curling and furling, springs that seep rather than surge, marshy patches where the water table sits close to the surface and the ground is permanently, gently sodden. The forest would have had streams, certainly. Movement of water, yes. But tumbling silver ribbons catching the cinematic light? That, almost certainly, was the director adding a morsel of enchantment that the landscape itself would not have provided.
I grew up near here. I know this land. Chatsworth House is not far — different geology entirely, the Peak District getting properly dramatic with its limestone and gritstone. Hardwick Hall sits on its ridge. But Sherwood itself?
Sherwood is flat.
Taken around the time I was in an apprenticeship position with KG Archery. I do not shoot arrows I only fletch them.
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Sherwood is gentle. Sherwood is ancient, sandy, quietly magnificent forest that does not need to throw itself off cliffs to prove anything.
One cannot have tumbling cascades where the earth itself refuseth to tumble.
What Sherwood Forest Actually Has Instead
Before you pack away your walking boots in disappointment, the forest is not without its water. It simply expresses it differently.
The streams and brooks that thread through the woodland are genuinely beautiful — clear, unhurried, edged with marsh grasses and the kind of vegetation that only grows where the ground is reliably damp. In spring particularly, when everything is green in that specific, almost violent way that English woodland manages in April and May, these quiet waterways are worth every step of the walk.
There are pools. There are boggy clearings. There are places where the water table announces itself through the soles of your boots before you see it. None of this is a waterfall. All of it is Sherwood.
Centre Parcs sits on the edge of it now — I remember when it was being built, which dates me precisely and I accept this without apology. Even within that managed holiday village, the forest pushes through. The ancient character of the place does not entirely submit to modernisation. Sherwood is stubborn that way.
The Major Oak, Revisited
The Major Oak is believed to be somewhere between 800 and 1,000 years old. It was already ancient when Robin Hood was already a legend. When I pressed myself into that crack in its bark as a small girl in the 1980s, I was touching something that had stood through the Wars of the Roses, through the Civil War, through centuries of English history that I had only read about in books. The tree had been old for longer than most nations have existed.
I have a photograph of myself beside it, somewhere. Eight years old, in summer clothes, squinting into the light. Later there is one in my Girl Guide uniform. The forest stayed in my life as I grew up, which is perhaps the most Nottinghamshire thing I can admit to.
What struck me, thinking about it this week, is how many children have had that same thought in that same spot. That same wondering. That same deliberate, chosen, joyful willingness to entertain the possibility. That is not naivety. That is imagination doing its proper work. And the fact that thousands of us have stood in the same place and felt the same thing — that is its own kind of magic, quite separate from any legend.
The Waterfall Was Real Enough
The director of that 1952 film added a waterfall that geology would not support. He made Sherwood Forest slightly more dramatic than Sherwood Forest actually is. And I find, on reflection, that I cannot object to this.
Stories have always done this. Robin Hood himself has been doing it for centuries — growing taller, faster, more righteous with every retelling, until the historical man (if there was one) bears only a passing resemblance to the legend that has outlasted him by eight hundred years. A little cinematic waterfall is the least of the liberties taken.
The costume was wonderful. The horses were majestic. The donkeys were unbearably adorable. And Nottingham Castle, which I have walked around in my own person, looked every bit as dramatic as memory recalls.
If a tiny, geologically implausible waterfall adds to that — if it makes the forest feel more like the forest of myth, more like the place where the legend lives — then perhaps that is a kindness, not a deception.
I am planning to visit this summer. A picnic. Nothing elaborate. Just the forest and whatever the weather decides and the particular quality of light that comes through ancient oak canopy on a good English afternoon. I want to walk the paths I walked as a child, find the brooks that meander quietly where no waterfall ever fell, and stand in front of the Major Oak — which has its crutches now, its splints and supports — and remember the eight-year-old who squeezed into a crack in the bark and thought, what if?
She is still in there somewhere. Still wondering. Still choosing, quite deliberately, to keep believing.
The waterfalls in Sherwood Forest are exactly where they have always been: in the film, in the story, in the part of us that needs the legend to be a little more beautiful than the geology strictly permits.
And I think Robin Hood would be absolutely fine with that.
Nina is the founder of SEO Lady Ltd, a UK digital marketing consultancy established in 2008. She grew up in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, and has been visiting Sherwood Forest since before she had the vocabulary to explain why it mattered.
The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952) is a Walt Disney production directed by Ken Annakin. The Major Oak, Sherwood Forest, is managed by the Forestry England and is free to visit.
