The Cammo Ash

One of the oldest ash trees in Edinburgh grows in a park with no house left standing in it. Cammo Estate was laid out from 1710 by Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, a lawyer, composer and self-taught landscape designer who spent the following years building what may have been Scotland's first true landscape garden around Cammo House. The house is a shell now, roofless and fenced off after decades of fire and vandalism following its abandonment in the 1970s, but the plantings Clerk commissioned outlived the family that made them: beech, horse chestnut, sycamore, and this ash, its trunk over a metre and a half across, which the Woodland Trust names among the oldest ash trees in the city. Edinburgh Council now manages the grounds as a wilderness nature reserve, deliberately left less manicured than a typical park, and the ash stands among yews, rhododendron and pine planted through the 18th and 19th centuries. No one has given this specific tree a documented planting date, so its age here is an estimate built from the estate's own timeline rather than a ring count, honestly short of certainty but long on plausibility. It costs nothing to visit, and the walk in passes the ruined tower and a Pictish standing stone on the way.