It usually isn’t my intention to give a brief history lesson on a guided backpacking trip especially if it didn’t actually happen inside the Big South Fork area but occasionally it does happen and this was one of those trips.
On our most recent adventure someone found something interesting on the trail.
I explained it's called an Oak Gall from an Oak tree and caused by a parasitic wasp. One might ask what’s so interesting about an Oak Gall.
Well I took my stag handle knife out and as I began to cut the Oak Gall open I started to talk about the 13th century and Runnymede a place near Windsor, England and the year of 1215.
Hundreds of years before the American Colonist revolted against the crown, rebel nobles in England drafted what is known as the Magna Carta meaning “great charter.”
The Magna Carta is a document that basically established the principle that everyone is subject to the law, even the King, and guarantees the rights of individuals, the right to justice and the right to a fair trial.
This Charter was written with a very special kind of ink that was made from an Oak Gall just like the one we found along the trail on our hiking trip.
As you can see by simply cutting this Gall open and sharpening a small stick it was very easy to use the ink inside to write on a piece of paper.
