What is the oldest tree in Tolpuddle?
The oldest tree in Tolpuddle is the Tolpuddle Martyrs Tree, a sycamore on the village green in Dorchester, Dorset. A 2005 assessment dated it to approximately 320 years, which puts it near 340 today. It is the largest sycamore in Dorset, at 6.06 metres round, and it is free to see, standing in the open on the public green.
In 1833, six Tolpuddle farm labourers met under this tree to discuss forming an agricultural trade union against falling wages. Six were arrested, tried in 1834 under an anti-mutiny act of 1797 for swearing a secret oath, and transported to Australia for seven years of penal labour. A mass petition and public marches overturned the sentences, and the men returned home after roughly three years; they are remembered as founding figures of the British trade union movement, and Tolpuddle holds an annual festival every July that draws thousands, centred on the village and this tree. The tree itself was about 150 years old on the day the Martyrs met beneath it. It is hollow enough that a television presenter was once lowered inside it for a National Trust documentary, and in 2023 the trunk was pollarded specifically to take weight off the limbs, work expected to extend its life by roughly two more centuries. It was named one of the 50 Great British Trees for the Queen's Golden Jubilee in 2002 and shortlisted for England's Tree of the Year in 2015.
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