The Acton Park Sweet Chestnut

In the hard years after the Second World War, Acton Park was stripped for firewood. This sweet chestnut was left standing, and it has since come through dozens of storms, including those of 2021 that brought down or maimed the trees around it. How old it is depends on who you ask. Local reporting, drawing on the council's figures, puts it at roughly 480 to 484 years, planted around the 1530s or 1540s, in the reign of Henry VIII. The European Tree of the Year entry rounds that up to more than 500. Neither is a ring count, so read the two together: something close to half a millennium, in a Wrexham park. The measurements are firmer. The trunk is 6.1 metres round and the tree stands 24 metres tall. What sets it apart is less its size than its use. This is not a roped-off relic. It is where people in Acton have their picnics and their tree parties, a working part of an ordinary council park. Wrexham Council and Coed Cadw, the Woodland Trust in Wales, nominated it for the UK Tree of the Year in 2023, and it won with 17 percent of the vote. At the European final in 2024 it came tenth of ten with 7,180 votes, which says more about the competition than about the tree. Our pin marks the park rather than the trunk, so if you find it, tell us exactly where it stands.