The Great Tsukubane Oak of Uneyama Shrine

In 1991 a typhoon went through this grove, brought down several of the giant trees it had been protected for four years earlier and wrecked the shrine hall of 1930. The parish rebuilt. Hiroshima Prefecture designated the giant trees of Uneyama Shrine a natural monument on 21 December 1987, counting eight specimens across five species, and the prefecture's own record calls the tsukubane oak here the largest in Hiroshima: two stems, 5.8 metres and 5.0. The national giant-tree survey lists a 5.2 metre trunk at this shrine in 2000, most likely the smaller of those stems, and an independent catalogue of village giants repeats the 5.8 and 5.0 pair. Tsukubane oak is one of the Japanese oaks that keeps its leaves all year, and a tree this size takes centuries, though no source puts a number on this one. Four more registered giants stand with it: a cedar, a hinoki cypress, an umbrella pine and a fir. The honest weak point is the pin. Neither the register nor OpenStreetMap holds a coordinate for this shrine, so the marker sits on the centre of the district, and finding the low hill in Kiyotake is part of the trip.