A RETIRED nurse has made a 7,000 mile pilgrimage from Canada to Hampshire every year for the past five years – to visit a tree.

Val Theroux, 64, is so infatuated with the oak that when she isn’t in the UK she calls it up on Google Earth to look at it.

During her annual visits to the oak in Brockenhurst in the New Forest the mother-of-two makes sure she gets up early in the morning so she can be alone with it and hugs it and stands her back against it.

Husband of 40 years, John, 63, jokes that it is her “tree lover”. He used to join her on the trips but now he prefers to stay at home.

Val discovered the oak, which is at a popular spot for picnic makers and has a rope for the children to swing from, in 2005 while visiting her daughter.

She said: “When I first walked in the New Forest I felt that I was home in a way that I never had before.”

Val, from Kamloops, in British Columbia, has flow to the tree every year since discovering it in 2008, spending about £4,000 in total.