Myths and folk­lore re­main alive in the com­mu­ni­ty of Mo­ri­ah in To­ba­go, where the last of the famed large silk cot­ton trees on the is­land stands.

Dur­ing a vis­it to the area, the gi­ant struc­ture stood tall over­look­ing the com­mu­ni­ty, with leg­endary sto­ries about it still bloom­ing.

There has been folk­lore passed on for gen­er­a­tions about spir­i­tu­al oc­cur­rences in­volv­ing the tree.

For ex­am­ple, there is one sto­ry about a man who was re­port­ed­ly per­form­ing a spir­i­tu­al rit­u­al and who end­ed up walk­ing up the tree back­wards. Leg­end has it he had to call vil­lage el­ders to help him down.

Res­i­dent Iroy Des Vi­gnes has heard it all, hav­ing spent his 32 years liv­ing in the vil­lage.

Up to this day, he said, “Peo­ple would come and put fruits by the tree, they said don’t in­ter­fere with the tree, like try­ing to cut it down or any­thing. Some­times bad things hap­pen to you, stuff like that.”

Des Vi­gnes said de­spite the fear fac­tor, he grew up play­ing in the tree. How­ev­er, no­body knows how old it is.

Even his 91-year-old great aunt met the tree there.

“To know the ac­tu­al age of the tree, we don’t re­al­ly know,” he said.

“A cer­tain time of the year it does have cot­ton, a kin­da silky brown­ish cot­ton that it will re­lease and at a cer­tain time of the year it does be dry, dry like it is go­ing to die and then it does flour­ish again with green leaves and stuff,” he added.

Over the years, the tree has con­tin­ued to be a sig­nif­i­cant tourist at­trac­tion.

“In terms of the size and the mag­ni­tude of this tree, it don’t have any oth­er like this. This tree is known all over, tourists come to see this tree and stuff like that,” Des Vi­gnes said.

He added that a few years ago, some tourists even tried to climb it but aban­doned the mis­sion as they were un­able to reach the mid­dle.

“They say they will have to come back some time but they nev­er came back af­ter that be­cause it was a dif­fi­cult chal­lenge for them,” he ex­plained.

There have been mur­murs on the is­land that the silk cot­ton tree has some­how played a role in the po­lit­i­cal for­tunes and mis­for­tunes of par­ties. How­ev­er, Des Vi­gnes said he has no such in­for­ma­tion.

What he does know, though, is that if the age­ing tree de­cides to fall, then that will spell se­ri­ous prob­lems for vil­lages or any­one head­ing to the North­ern side of the is­land to places like Cas­tara and Par­latu­vi­er.

“It has no al­ter­na­tive route so is just one road in and out. So, if some­thing is sup­posed to hap­pen to that tree, well I don’t know what is the next route they will take,” he said.

He ex­plained that some time ago, there was a plan to cut down the tree but that was not fol­lowed through due to the fact that the tree’s roots are hold­ing up a ma­jor part of the road­way.

Guardian Me­dia reached out to the THA Sec­re­tary for the Di­vi­sion of In­fra­struc­ture, Quar­ries and Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Trevor James to find out if there is a plan in the event the tree falls, but a re­sponse is yet to be re­ceived.

In De­cem­ber 2020, the oth­er fa­mous silk cot­ton tree in Cul­lo­den was up­root­ed and fell. For decades, folk­lore had said the Cul­lo­den tree was the one which an African witch called Gang Gang Sarah at­tempt­ed to take flight to re­turn to Africa.