The Tausendjaehrige Eiche of Boetersheim

This oak once caught fire and smouldered for weeks. An old local account dates the burning bark to around 1904, after a lightning strike. It survived. In 1959 the trunk burst and a large limb came down, and it survived that too. What stands beside the war memorial today is completely hollow, deeply fissured, packed with rotted wood, and held together at the top with steel cables and props. The trunk measures 7.10 metres around in the most recent survey and 7.3 metres in a measurement taken on 10 August 2016, which either way makes it one of the largest oaks in Lower Saxony. Height is recorded as 21 to 23 metres depending on the survey, under a crown about 14 metres across. Both registers that carry it give the age as 600 to 800 years. As with half the veteran oaks in Germany it is known locally as the Tausendjährige Eiche, and as with most of them the thousand years are a nickname rather than a measurement. Hollow does not mean finished. Both sources describe it as alive, declining slowly, which is roughly what a 700-year-old oak is supposed to be doing. Boetersheim is a hamlet of about 150 people with an old watermill and a smithy, walkable end to end in ten minutes, and this tree is the reason to stop.