The Maiden Oak of St Fagans

Most of Britain's big old oaks were worked for a living. They were pollarded for firewood or cut back for fence posts, which squatted them and, as it turned out, kept them alive for centuries. This one was left alone. A maiden oak has never been cut, so what you get is the tree's own natural shape on a single trunk, and this trunk now measures 5.38 metres round on the grounds of St Fagans National Museum of History, on the western edge of Cardiff. Nobody has dated it. Put the girth through the usual rough growth rate for an open-grown oak, somewhere between one and a half and three centimetres of girth a year, and you get a band of roughly 180 to 350 years, which is as close as honesty gets without a corer. That puts its first decades somewhere between the reign of Charles II and the early years of Victoria's, and it means the tree was already standing well before the museum was. Volunteers surveying Cardiff's ancient and veteran trees in 2023 updated its record rather than opening one, so the inventories already knew about it. It stands among the farmhouses, chapels and cottages that St Fagans has moved here piece by piece from across Wales and rebuilt. The grounds are free. Nobody has published where in the 100 acres it stands, so allow time for the hunt.