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We recommend a stop off at the Notley Arms Inn on the way back to rest weary legs. Hollow Way is the perfect moniker for this sunken Lane which creates a perfectly round tunnel through the trees.

They’re at their colourful best in Spring and perfect for a game of hide-and-seek, no matter your age. Paths and tunnels weave through the rhododendrons at Sheringham Park. Rhododendron tunnels, Sheringham Park, Norfolk As haunted-looking as some of the most famous tree tunnels but a bit rougher round the edges and more ‘real’, this is a joy to find as you turn into it. Kilsyth has one in the Burnside area, close to the sportsground. Some of the best tree tunnels are the slightly wild ones you just happen across. Untamed tree tunnel, Kilsyth, North Lanarkshire The cathedral-esque curves of this tree tunnel in the grounds of Gormanston College near Dublin makes for a spooky walk with a quiet reverence about it. Gormanston College Fairytale Tree Tunnel, County Meath Victorians went mad for yews, apparently. It proved enormously popular in the Victorian era. Experts originally thought this tunnel to be a thousand years old but in the 1990s dendochronologists (tree-daters to you and I) decided it was probably only a quarter of that age and guess it was planted in the 1700s. Yew Tree Tunnel in Aberglasney Gardens, Camarthenshire

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It’s believed to be the longest and oldest in Britain and is best visited when the flowers are in full bloom and hanging down into the tunnel at the end of May and the beginning of June. This 55m-long laburnum arch was planted in 1880 at Bodnant Garden, now owned by the National Trust. It’s seriously spooky, with branches that look terrifyingly like they might just reach down and pluck you off the road.

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Hockney painted them outside, rather than in his studio, and it’s worth familiarising yourself with the pieces before you visit you get the feeling of stepping around Hockney himself seated at his easel as you approach.Ĭreated by more than 150 beech trees planted along the Bregagh Road between Armoy and Stanocum by the Stuart family as an entrance to Gracehill Manor, this tunnel is so spooky it’s been featured in films and TV series including Game of Thrones. Immortalised by David Hockney, who painted this tree tunnel in various seasons (they were exhibited at the Royal Academy for some time), this tunnel is between the villages of Langtoft and Kilham. The woodland path has worn down over the years, giving the whole tunnel a circular effect and the look of a Tolkien novel. Halnaker (pronounced ‘Ha’nacker’) is just north of Chichester and this tree tunnel walk (pictured above) follows the ancient Roman road, Stane Street.

We think a good tree tunnel is a very fine focus for a good autumn walk, so we’ve listed a few of our favourites around Britain and Ireland. Others are formed naturally, when a path is formed through trees by either footfall or vehicles and the branches meet in the middle overhead, never able to grow lower than the tallest person who regularly passes through. Some tree tunnels are partially ‘man’made’, with trees planted in avenues to offer a shady walk in summer and a canopy of silhouetted branches in winter. Of course you know that at the end of the tunnel the world will be much as it was on the side you entered it, but the strangeness of being cocooned by trees brings, just for a moment, that feeling that anything is possible and at the end of the tunnel might lie an entirely different world. Those moments when you walk (or sometimes drive) through a tunnel of trees are a bit special, giving you at once a feeling of being hidden from the world and also transported somewhere magical. Walk through a tree tunnel near you and feel like you’re entering fairyland

Tunnel of trees