Baobabs keep time on a scale that makes human history look hasty. When researchers carbon-dated the Sunland tree, they found wood roughly 1,060 years old, give or take seventy-five years, meaning it was already a sapling when the kingdoms of medieval Europe were just forming, and some studies have argued it was older still. African baobabs do not grow in simple rings; they build themselves from multiple fused stems around a hollowing core, which is why a single tree can hold an interior cavity large enough to furnish. The species, Adansonia digitata, stores water in its swollen trunk and survives droughts that would kill almost anything else, bare and grey for much of the year, then bursting into white blossom in spring.

The two hollows of the Sunland Baobab each had a purpose. One became the bar; the other, a wine cellar, where the tree's own natural ventilation held the air at a steady 22 degrees Celsius year-round, a built-in temperature control no winemaker could engineer. The chambers connected through a narrow internal passage, so a patron could squeeze from the taproom to the cellar without ever stepping outside. The tree became a minor pilgrimage site, drawing visitors from across the world who wanted to drink inside something a thousand years old. It also gave shelter to creatures with no interest in the beer: at one point, two pairs of owls nested in the canopy and the cavities, alongside other birds.

Putting numbers to a baobab is harder than it sounds, because the tree is not one trunk but a cluster of fused stems wrapped around hollow space. At its peak the Sunland tree stood about 22 metres tall, with a crown spreading some 30 metres and a circumference, measured around its swollen base, of more than 30 metres. That made it one of the largest baobabs known, in the same conversation as the Glencoe Baobab a few hundred kilometres away, which had been larger still until it split in 2009. The radiocarbon work that produced its famous age revealed the architecture: the dated samples came from the walls of the two inner cavities, the oldest of them carrying the thousand-year reading, with the larger stem somewhat younger. The tree had, in effect, been hollowing and rebuilding itself for as long as it had been alive.

Then the giant began to come apart. In August 2016, a full third of the tree split away and collapsed, and further splits followed in 2017, bringing down the stems that had formed the main body of the baobab and ending the pub for good. The owners chose not to clear the wreckage, leaving the fallen trunk where it lay so that natural processes could slowly reclaim it. The collapse was no isolated tragedy. A scientific study published in 2018 found that most of the oldest and largest baobabs in southern Africa had died within little more than a decade, a die-off that has left researchers genuinely unsure of the cause, though many suspect a changing climate. The Sunland Baobab outlived empires. It did not, in the end, outlive its own century.