What is the oldest tree in Liverpool?
The oldest tree in Liverpool is the Allerton Oak in Calderstones Park, Allerton. It is everywhere called a thousand years old, though that figure is tradition rather than measurement, so the honest band runs from about 400 years to 1,000. It stands behind a protective double fence, a 15 to 20 minute walk from Mossley Hill or West Allerton station, and in 2019 it was voted England's Tree of the Year with 34 percent of more than eleven thousand votes.
The thousand-year figure has been repeated so often that it reads like a measurement, and it is not one. No ring count is possible on a trunk this hollow, and no planting record exists, so what remains is a girth of 5.5 metres and a tree that is plainly very old. Hence the wide band: 400 years at the cautious end, a thousand at the traditional one. Two stories are usually told to fill the gap, and neither dates the tree. The first says the local hundred court met under its branches in the Middle Ages, which is where the nickname the Law Oak comes from, though some historians think the neolithic Calderstones nearby are the likelier meeting place. The second blames the trunk's great split on the Lottie Sleigh, a ship carrying eleven tonnes of gunpowder that exploded on the Mersey on 15 February 1864 and was felt across the city. Historic Liverpool's verdict on that is simply that no one can really say. Both are good stories about the oak. Neither is evidence of its age.
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