The Oak at the Hertekop

Everything at this crossroads has been replaced except the tree. It was called the Hertekop after a hunting chalet built here with deer antlers fixed to it. The chalet became an inn. The inn became one of those places everyone in a town knows, where people arranged to meet and where walks and outings started from. Then a southern ring road was laid around Amersfoort, and later joined to a new trunk road running in from Utrecht, and the place changed out of all recognition. The chalet went. What is here now is a slip road off the A28 and a junction of the Arnhemseweg and the Dodeweg. What is also here is an oak the register bands 1750 to 1800, which was already a substantial tree when the chalet was a going concern, and which is the oldest living thing in Amersfoort. It is not a beautiful setting and that is exactly the reason to go. Two and a half centuries of a place reorganising itself around a fixed point, and the fixed point is a tree that nobody decided to keep so much as never quite got round to removing. Park on the Dodeweg rather than trying to stop on the Arnhemseweg.