The Champion Planes of New Square

Two plane trees in New Square have outgrown almost everything else on Trinity's campus, and both went in around 1834, when the college was rebuilding this quadrangle. The larger of the pair has a girth over five metres, the widest trunk of any tree on college grounds by Trinity's own count. Students eating lunch on the grass beneath them are sitting under trees planted when Daniel O'Connell was a sitting MP at Westminster, decades before the Easter Rising and a full century before the Irish Free State existed. Trinity's own tree survey lists this pair among the oldest specimens left on the main campus, most of the older generation having since died or been felled, including a celebrated pair of Oregon maples in Library Square that came down in 2018, one collapsing overnight in June and the other felled weeks later once the same fungal decay was found in it. New Square sits behind the Museum Building, a short walk from the queue for the Book of Kells, and unlike that queue, it costs nothing and never has one.