What is the oldest tree in Allouville-Bellefosse?
The oldest tree in Allouville-Bellefosse is the Chêne Chapelle, an oak roughly 800 to 1,200 years old with two chapels built into its lightning-hollowed trunk since 1696. Its girth measures about 15 metres, and a spiral staircase wrapped around the outside lets visitors climb between the two chapels. It stands free and open on the village street next to the church.
Two figures circulate for the tree's age and neither carries a ring count. Local tradition dates the planting to around 800, under Charlemagne, which would put it close to 1,200 years old; a more cautious scientific estimate puts it nearer 800. Both are repeated across sources and neither is settled, so the honest answer sits somewhere in that span, older than the church built beside it either way. Lightning struck the oak sometime in the 1600s and hollowed the trunk enough that two priests, Abbé du Détroit and Father du Cerceau, built two chapels into it from 1696: Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix low down and the Chambre de l'Ermite above. Both still stand, reached by a spiral staircase around the trunk's outside rather than through it. The tree nearly did not survive the Revolution: a local resident is said to have renamed it the Temple of Reason rather than let it be felled as a relic of the old order, and it worked. France classified it a monument historique in 1932, and its own French Wikipedia entry confirms it is still alive, producing foliage and acorns.
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