What is the oldest tree in Belfast?
The oldest tree in Belfast is the Belvoir Oak in Belvoir Park Forest, in the south of the city. DAERA, the government department that manages the forest, calls it the oldest living oak in Ireland at 500 to 600 years old; a senior ranger who assessed it in 2016 said more than 400 and that its condition makes an exact age impossible, so the honest band is 400 to 600. It stands near the Motte, roughly a 15 minute walk from Galwally halt, and the pin here marks the forest rather than the trunk.
There is an unresolved question sitting under that answer, and it is worth knowing before the walk. Robert Welch photographed a great oak in Belvoir Park Forest more than a century ago, already well over 300 years old and known locally as Granddad. Northern Ireland's Remarkable Trees project states plainly that Granddad may not be the same specimen as the tree now promoted as the Belvoir Oak, which means two distinct veterans may stand near the Motte, one of them seriously declined and the other healthier and better publicised. Nobody has settled it in public, and a reader who walks that ground can probably settle it faster than we can. One rival for the title is not an oak and not a tree. The Australian grass tree inside the Palm House at the Botanic Gardens is put at over 400 years, which overlaps the oak's range, and it is a monocot rather than a tree in the usual sense. On the numbers as they stand the oak takes it, on a range that runs from 400 years to 600.
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