The Plane Tree of Abbey Green

Abbey Green is a small paved square tucked into the medieval streets just south of Bath Abbey, and a single giant London Plane fills nearly all of it, its canopy reaching over the surrounding Georgian facades. Local tradition holds it was planted as a sapling in 1793, which would make it one of the oldest deliberately planted trees of its kind anywhere. Mary Shelley lived at 5 Abbey Churchyard, overlooking the green, while writing most of Frankenstein between 1816 and 1817, and if the 1793 date is right, she would have looked out at this same tree. Historical maps complicate the story. The tree does not appear on an 1852 survey of the area but is clearly present by 1888, which points to a planting closer to the 1880s instead, six decades later than the popular legend claims. Either date makes it a serious tree, not a young one, and the square's own nickname, the Hanging Tree, comes from a separate and even less documented local legend about executions once carried out beneath its branches. Whichever story is true, the tree itself is real, and every December the city strings it with lights for the Bath Christmas Market, wrapped entirely around its trunk.