The Thick Oak of Beilen

Divide this trunk by its own growth rate and the local story comes apart. The oak measured five metres round in 2010 and puts on about 2.3 centimetres of girth a year, which the national register works back into a planting somewhere between 1750 and 1800. Local information had said 1600 to 1700, and the Drents Archief settled on 350 years. Both readings are kept here, because arithmetic on a growth rate is an argument and not a ring count. Whichever is right, it went in as a grensboom, a boundary tree, marking the edge of the Eursinge es. An es is the communal arable field of a Drenthe village, manured for centuries with sods and dung until the ground stood visibly higher than the land around it, and its edges mattered enough to be planted. It has been looked after since. The crown has carried cable braces since the 1980s, it came through the ice storm of 1987 without lasting damage, and it turns up in both of the standard Dutch books on monumental trees, de Graaff's of 1991 and Moens's of 2010. It stands at a road junction outside Beilen where the Esweg meets the Asserweg, with nothing near it. Locally nobody uses the long name. It is de Dikke Eik, the thick oak.