The Brimmon Oak

A dual carriageway was bent around this tree. In 2015 the A483 Newtown bypass was drawn straight through the field where it stands, and the farming family who have worked that land for generations started a petition. Five thousand signatures and a hearing at the Senedd later, the route shifted about 15 metres and the oak stayed put. Wales made it Welsh Tree of the Year, Britain made it UK Tree of the Year 2016, and in the 2017 European Tree of the Year it finished second across the whole continent on 16,203 votes, the best result a British tree has managed in that award. It is a pollarded oak with a girth of 6.80 metres, recorded by the Woodland Trust's Ancient Tree Inventory. The age everyone quotes is around 500 years, a repeated round figure rather than a measurement, so take it broadly: four to six centuries of Powys weather. A photograph from 1901 shows a wedding party gathered under its branches, which says how long it has been the local landmark rather than simply an old tree. The catch is where you stand. It grows on working private farmland, fenced inside a protected root zone, with no path to the trunk. You see it from the roadside, from the very bypass that was moved for it, and that road is fast with nowhere marked to pull in. Newtown station is a twenty-minute walk up Brimmon Lane, which is the calmer way to come and look.