The Allerton Oak

In 2019 this oak took 34 percent of more than eleven thousand votes and was named England's Tree of the Year, then went on to represent England in the European competition. It had already won the English title once before, in 2014. It is everywhere called a thousand years old. That number is tradition, not measurement: the trunk is hollow, which rules out ring counting, and nobody wrote down a planting. The honest band runs from about 400 years to that thousand. What can be measured is a girth of 5.5 metres and a trunk split from top to bottom. Two stories attach to the split and neither is settled. One says the local hundred court sat under its branches in the Middle Ages, which is why it is also called the Law Oak, though some historians prefer the neolithic Calderstones nearby as the meeting place. The other blames the Lottie Sleigh, a ship carrying eleven tonnes of gunpowder that blew up on the Mersey on 15 February 1864 and was felt across Liverpool. Historic Liverpool's verdict is that no one can really say. Metal crutches have carried its heaviest limbs since 1907, replaced from 2019 by adjustable modern props at a cost near eighty thousand pounds. It still drops something like a hundred thousand acorns a year. A Liverpool Echo piece in the 1970s predicted it would be dead by 2020.