The Cross Tree of Chagford

[This photo is of the site of Chagfords Cross tree, now supplanted by a granite boulder installed at the millennium.  Though I have asked many people no one appears to know much about the origional tree, despight it being celebrated in a kneeler in the local church.  Many Devon and some Somerset and Dorset villages had Cross Trees, often situated just outside the church entrance. Most where elm, but Chagfords was an oak.  There is some confusion as to whether they are called cross trees because of being at a cross ways (the entrance to the church) or whether they had some religious connotation.  During the middle ages the church frequently had to petition people to stop worshiping under trees and by rocks and springs, albeit in a Christian way.  I have read somewhere about one cross tree being used for religious purposes as a hangover from Catholic times in England.

The only rumors I found to Chagfords Cross Tree was that it was once part of a giant circle of trees that surrounded (and predated!) the land where the church now stands, a druids grove none the less, with one tree standing in historic times in the square (never seen any evidence for this) and the last one being the that which felled in the 1970's, called the Cross Tree...  Very mysterious...]