The Snuff Mills Quarry-edge Oak

This oak grows on the lip of a sheer drop. Snuff Mills was quarried once, and the old quarry face along the Frome valley is now a vertical cliff. The oak stands right at its top edge, beside the path, with nothing much between its roots and the air. The Bristol Tree Forum, which put it on its list of twenty remarkable Bristol trees that hold no national record, says simply that it defies gravity. The Forum calls it very ancient and squat, which is about all anyone has written down. There is no published girth and no age, not even a rough estimate, and we have found no second source for this particular tree. If you know how old it is, or have measured it, tell us. What the Forum does say is where to look. In summer the oak is one tree among many along the top path. In winter, with the leaves down, it shows from the lower path along the river, a low, broad shape hunched on the very edge of the cliff above you. That is the view worth coming for, and it needs no scrambling. Snuff Mills is a public riverside park on the Frome in Stapleton, free and open to walk. A small-leaved lime with weeping branches grows on the riverbank a few hundred metres along the river, listed by the same survey.