Seasons1 of 4
A miner spelled his girlfriend's initial in living wood. Around 1920 Vic Stead, who worked the pits at Garforth, took three young beeches on his way through Parlington Woods and grafted them together so they would grow as the letter N. The N was for Nellie Mosby, the woman he was courting. They married, and the letter kept growing. A century later it is still legible: three trunks bound into one shape a few hundred yards from the Dark Arch on Parlington Lane, known locally as the Love Tree. Richard Mabey put it in Flora Britannica in 1996 as one of the most touching twentieth-century landmark trees in the country. In 2018 it was voted English Tree of the Year and then UK Tree of the Year, and in 2019 it placed ninth in Europe. It has since become the emblem of the local campaign against development in the woods around it, and it collects marriage proposals of its own; people walk out here with rings. The wood is free and open, and it is about a twenty-minute walk in from Aberford village. The place to stand is the graft, where the three trunks meet and the letter resolves. The 1920 date is properly documented, which is more than most trees this age can say, but nobody has ever put a tape around the trunks and no recent survey of its condition is on record. If you walk past it, tell us how the N is holding up.
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Getting there
Parlington Lane, Parlington Woods (Parlington's Wilderness), near the Dark Arch, Aberford, West Yorkshire
You can recognise it by three beech trunks grafted together into the shape of the letter N, the graft point visible partway up. It stands beside Parlington Lane, a few hundred yards from the Dark Arch folly.
Reached on foot along the Barwick to Aberford bridleway walk through the Parlington Estate (Leeds Country Way). The estate is commercially owned and, apart from its public rights of way, is out of bounds, so stay on the waymarked paths; we have not confirmed that the tree stands on the path itself.
No rail station nearby. Regular bus services run from Leeds (roughly 12km away) to Aberford village; from the village it is about a 15-20 minute walk into Parlington Woods via Parlington Lane to the tree.
Autumn colour
October to November: copper and russet, and young trees keep dead leaves all winter
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.