The Sweet Chestnut of Ashton Park

Sweet Chestnuts spiral as they age, their bark twisting around the trunk in a pattern that gets more pronounced with every passing century, and Ashton Park's oldest is a dramatic example: an estimated 600 years old, with a girth of over eight metres, according to the Bristol Tree Forum's own survey of the city's veteran trees. Sweet Chestnut is not native to Britain, introduced by the Romans and long favoured by estate owners for timber and for the nuts it produces, and a tree of this size and age likely dates to well before Ashton Court passed through its various private owners into Bristol City Council's hands in 1959. It shares its parkland with the Domesday Oak and more than a hundred other ancient pollard oaks, together forming the largest concentration of veteran trees anywhere in Britain outside Windsor Great Park, a legacy of centuries spent as private deer park rather than farmed or built over.