The Birnam Oak stands in a strip of woodland on the south bank of the Tay, a short walk from the Telford bridge. It's a sessile oak with a trunk 5.5 metres round, and its huge lower limbs now rest on wooden crutches to stop them breaking under their own weight.
Its age is not known for sure, but its girth suggests about 600 years. That would make it a mature tree when Shakespeare wrote "till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane". Whether or not it's really Macbeth's wood, it's a fine, slightly melancholy old tree, and the riverside path from here leads on to the Hermitage.