The Boole Library Redwoods

The tallest trees on University College Cork's campus were paid for with beer. William Crawford of the Beamish & Crawford brewery, one of the young college's great benefactors, donated the pair of Giant Redwoods that now stand 27 and 29 metres above the Boole Library, and at roughly 150 years old they have barely started: in California's Sierra Nevada the species passes 2,000 years and 80 metres. They are the obvious landmarks of a campus that is quietly one of Ireland's best tree collections, planted continuously since the college opened in 1849 and accredited as an arboretum by the international ArbNet programme in 2020, around 2,500 trees of some 120 species. The library beneath them is named for George Boole, the college's first professor of mathematics, whose two-value algebra now runs inside every computer on the desks inside. Students cram under trees that will outlive everything they are studying, and the university runs public tours of the campus trees led by its own plant scientists. Free, open to any walker, and fifteen minutes on foot from Grand Parade.