Allerton Oak
historic oak tree in England
The Allerton Oak is an Irish oak tree in Calderstones Park in Liverpool, England. It is thought to be around 1,000 years old and is described as the oldest oak in North West England. It is reputed to have been the setting for a medieval hundred court and said to have been damaged in an 1864 gunpowder explosion. The tree won the 2019 English Tree of the Year competition and had been entered into the 2020 European Tree of the Year competition.
History
The Allerton Oak is around 1,000 years old and is thought to pre-date the 1066 Norman Invasion. The tree has a girth of 5.5 metres (18 ft) and is thought to be in good health, producing some 100,000 acorns each year.
The Allerton Oak is said to have been the site of a medieval hundred court that sat beneath its branches, though some believe that the nearby neolithic burial monument at Calderstones (demolished in the Victorian era) is the more likely site for the court. The tree is also reputed to have been damaged in 1864 when the merchant ship Lottie Sleigh, carrying 11 tonnes of gunpowder, exploded on the River Mersey, some 3 miles (4.8 km) away. The detonation blew out the windows of the nearby Calderstones Manor and is said to have caused a large crack in the trunk of the tree which has weakened it structurally.
The tree and the land it stands on was owned by Henry and Charles MacIver from 1875 until 1902 when they gave it to the Liverpool Corporation to form Calderstones Park.
“Allerton Oak” enters the record as historic oak tree in England. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Allerton, historic and tree can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q76482504. Authority coordinates are 53.383, -2.893. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1864, 2019, 2020 and 1066.
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This entry incorporates text from “Allerton Oak” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.