Two information boards stand beside this oak and they disagree with each other. One says the tree is 300 years old, the other says 438. Nobody has settled it, and the Czech Wikipedia entry records the discrepancy rather than choosing, which is the honest position: somewhere between three hundred and four hundred and fifty years, with the boards themselves as the evidence of how loosely that is known. What the oak is agreed to be is a survivor. It is described as the last of the oaks planted to hold the embankments of the Velky rybnik, the Great Fishpond founded in 1577, and it stands near where the Strazna bouda, the guard cottage, used to be. The cottage is gone and so is the rest of the planting. The tree is 630 centimetres round, up from 600 when it was measured in 2004, and 27 metres tall. It has been protected since 2005 and had tree surgery in March 2011. In 2010 it won Czech Tree of the Year and went on to represent the country in the European competition. Getting to it is deliberately unglamorous. A dusty field track runs between Hlusovice and Chomoutov, unmarked and unsignposted, walkable or better on a bike, and the oak is simply standing beside it in the fields. There is no gate and nothing to pay.
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Getting there
Beside a field track between Hlusovice and Chomoutov, south of Bohunovice
You can recognise it by two disagreeing information boards beside it and a trunk 6.30 metres round. It stands alone by a dusty field track between the villages of Hlusovice and Chomoutov.
Free, reached on foot or by bike along an unmarked dusty field track between the villages of Hlusovice and Chomoutov; no formal tourist trail. One source describes the surrounding ground loosely as private agricultural land, but no gate, fence or restriction on the tree itself was found; flagging rather than blocking.
No public transport to the exact spot; Bohunovice/Chomoutov area is on regional bus routes, tree is a field-track walk from the nearest stop.
In fruit
September to October: acorns drop, and a good mast year buries the ground in them
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.