Le Chêne de Tronjoly (Ar Ven Der)
Approximate location. Show us where it is
How do I find it? You can recognise it by the trunk, about 12 metres round and split into a living half and a standing dead stub, with oak beams propping the lowest limbs. It stands alone beside a stream at Tronjoly, inside wooden barriers.
Around 1750 a hermit named Le Graet is said to have moved into this tree, keeping a bed, a table and a library inside the hollow trunk. That gives some idea of the space. The measurements agree on the scale and not much else: 12 metres round in 2008, 12.5 in 2015, and a reported 13 before the trunk split into a living half and a standing dead stub. Ted Green of the Ancient Tree Forum, quoted by the commune and by French dendrologists, reckons it may be the largest oak trunk in continental Europe. Its age depends on who you ask, and the gap is not a detail. That same reading puts it at 1300 to 1600 years. A 2015 account of the tree settles nearer 900 to 1200. Neither can be checked against the rings, because there is no longer enough trunk left to count. Bretons call it Ar Ven Der, the oak tree, as though there were no others. It stands by itself where three slopes meet above a stream running down to the Leguer, classified an arbre remarquable since April 2004. In February 2015 oak beams, jointed by mortise and tenon, were set under the heaviest lower limbs to stop them tearing away. The land around it is a working farm rather than a park, and wooden barriers mark how close a visitor may go.
- Species
- Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur)
- Girth
- 12.5 m
- Location
- Tronjoly hamlet, near the Bodeillo farm, Bulat-Pestivien, 22160 Côtes-d'Armor, Brittany, France (Tronjoly, Bulat-Pestivien (near Callac))
- Access
- On private land (a farm at Bodeillo), but the owner has stated publicly and repeatedly over at least a decade (2015-2016 sources) that the tree remains open to visitors as long as they are respectful and stay within the marked area: wooden barriers delimit the authorised viewing zone and there is streamside parking a short walk away. No booking, ticket or doorbell needed, but it is someone's working farm rather than a park, so state this plainly rather than calling it simply 'free'.
- Getting there
- Rural and remote, 'deep in Brittany' per one source, a few km northeast of Callac. No public transport reaches the site; a car is required, with parking near the tree itself as described by visitors.
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Sources
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