The Tolpuddle Martyrs Tree

The British trade union movement has a birthplace with a postcode, and it is a sycamore on a village green in Dorset. In 1833 six farm labourers met under this tree to discuss forming an agricultural union as their wages fell. In 1834 they were tried under an anti-mutiny act of 1797, not for the union itself but 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 were home after roughly three. The tree was about 150 years old on the day they sat under it. A 2005 assessment dated it to approximately 320 years, which puts it near 340 now, though that dating is itself two decades old. At 6.06 metres round at chest height it is the largest sycamore in Dorset, and hollow enough that a television presenter was once lowered inside it for the National Trust. Hollow is not the same as finished. In 2023 the trunk was pollarded to take weight off the limbs, work expected to buy it another two centuries. Every July the village fills for the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival and several thousand people walk past a tree that was named one of the 50 Great British Trees in 2002 and shortlisted for England's Tree of the Year in 2015. The museum beside it is free, and so is the green.