Newtown maps one tree, and a road was moved to keep it. The Brimmon Oak stands on private farmland beside the A483 Newtown bypass, a pollarded oak with a girth of 6.80 metres and an age put at roughly five hundred years. In 2015 a 5,000-signature petition shifted the new road about 15 metres rather than fell it, and in 2017 it finished second across the whole of Europe in that year's Tree of the Year award, the best result any British tree has managed. You see it from the road; there is no path to the trunk.
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The Brimmon Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 500 years · Brimmon, on the edge of Newtown, Powys
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.
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