The Oak of Hersberg

Call it the thousand-year oak and nobody in Bech will correct you, but no source found supports anywhere near that age. It is a real name attached to a real tree, not a real number. A September 2024 field visit reported that official assessments put it closer to 300 years; a separate, unsourced estimate of roughly 500 years also circulates and is repeated by French Wikipedia without further backing. Both figures are recorded here rather than settled, because neither has a ring count behind it. The girth is better documented than the age: 5.74 metres in 1907, 6.87 in 1958, 7.40 in 1997 and 7.52 in 2016, a slow, steady thickening tracked across more than a century by different surveyors. A statue of Notre-Dame, Consolatrice des affligés, sits in a niche of the hollow trunk behind a protective grille, and since 1936 a torchlit procession has walked out from the parish church every 15 August to hold an open-air sermon at the tree's foot. It is a genuine, ongoing pilgrimage rather than a revived one. The most recent firsthand report, from that September 2024 visit, found the trunk sound and free of fungus, but the crown notably declined: only about a third of it still carries leaves. Alive, and worth a return visit to see how it is doing.