Dublin’s Hungry Tree: Approach At Your Peril!

Dublin has many famous landmarks, but one that should be more famous is the “Hungry Tree,” which is slowly digesting a park bench. In the grounds of the King’s Inns, the training ground of centuries of Irish lawyers and barristers, stands a vast London Plane tree of unknown age. Although listed as one of Ireland’s Heritage Trees by the Tree Council of Ireland, but its real claim to fame is the park bench it’s been slowly swallowing up over time.

The steel bench is now firmly lodged within the tree’s bulk, and visitors love to take pictures of themselves on the bench being “eaten” by the tree. Local slang refers to Irish barristers as benchers, but whether that is because they like posing on this bench while attending the King’s Inns as students, or because people wish the tree would eat a few of them as well as the bench, is unclear.