The Linden of the Old Rothof
age unknownSmall-leaved Lime
Which one is it? A lime standing alone by the road on Wildensorger Strasse, on open ground where the Rothof once stood. There is no building left to mark the spot beyond the tree itself.
The estate this tree is named after was pulled down in the middle of the 1960s. The Rothof stood on the Wildensorger Straße, up on the hillside west of Bamberg; the buildings went, and the ground eventually went to the city's drinking water, which is what the site holds now. The lime is still there, on what the register calls the northern boundary of the property. A boundary line with nothing left to divide. That whole history is in the register's own wording. Natural monument 6, protected under the city ordinance of November 1995: "1 Linde am ehemaligen Rothof, nördliche Grundstücksgrenze". One lime at the former Rothof, northern property line. The farm is described in the past tense and the tree is not. It is a small-leaved lime and it stands by the road, which is the useful part for anyone walking up: no gate, no garden, no permission. The hillside route that takes in the Teufelsgraben oak and the pair of limes at the Ottobrunnen passes within about a kilometre and a half of it, so all three fit into one afternoon on foot. How much of the Rothof this lime actually saw is the open question. Nobody has dated it and nobody has measured the trunk. If you have, tell us.
The button above opens directions in your maps app. Uphill from central Bamberg in Wildensorg/Berggebiet; reachable by Bamberg city bus toward Wildensorg, then on foot.
- Species
- Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata)
- Age estimate
- Location
- Wildensorger Straße, at the site of the former Rothof estate, Wildensorg (Berggebiet), Bamberg (Wildensorg)
- Access
- Free. The historic Rothof estate building itself was demolished in the mid-1960s (per infranken.de reporting on the site's later redevelopment as a municipal water reservoir); the property is no longer a private residence, and OpenStreetMap tags the tree as a roadside lime on Wildensorger Straße rather than inside a fenced garden. Treated as publicly reachable on that basis.
- Getting there
- Uphill from central Bamberg in Wildensorg/Berggebiet; reachable by Bamberg city bus toward Wildensorg, then on foot.
Trees nearby
Ticking this one off, walks past several more, and your collection growing city by city: that is the Ancient Trees app.
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