The Guillotin Oak (Chêne à Guillotin)

A priest hid from the Revolution here, or so the story around this oak insists, and Pierre-Paul Guillotin's name replaced its older one, the Chêne des Rues-Éon, sometime in the 20th century. Whether he actually sheltered in or beside the trunk is tradition rather than record; what is on record is the tree itself, on the edge of the Forêt de Paimpont, the forest most people know as Brocéliande. Its age is genuinely disputed. French sources place it anywhere between 500 and 1,000 years, with both the tenth and fifteenth centuries put forward as its likely start, and nobody settles it. What can be measured is the trunk, 9.6 metres round at its widest, under a crown some 16 metres tall. In 2017 the national register of remarkable trees, A.R.B.R.E.S., gave it its own listing, independent of the forest's Arthurian reputation. The commune of Concoret bought the tree in 2000 and the Office National des Forêts has kept it alive since with synthetic bark patches and branch supports, work that shows rather than hides. A fence went up in 2019 to keep feet off the roots, but the oak stands beside a public path and is fully visible from it, one specific, named tree in a forest that has plenty of unnamed ones.