The Guillotin Oak (Chêne à Guillotin)
roughly 500 to 1,000 yearsPedunculate Oak
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.
The button above opens directions in your maps app. Near the hamlet of La Rue-Eon, commune of Concoret, Morbihan; no rail, reached by car or on the forest trail network, roughly 40 minutes from Rennes
- Species
- Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur)
- Age estimate
- roughly 500 to 1,000 years
- Location
- Near the hamlet of La Rue-Éon, Concoret, Morbihan, Brittany, France, on the edge of the Forêt de Paimpont (Brocéliande) (La Rue-Éon, Forêt de Paimpont)
- Access
- Free, standing beside a path on the edge of the Foret de Paimpont near La Rue-Eon; owned by the commune of Concoret since 2000 and fenced since 2019 to stop visitors touching the trunk, but fully visible and reachable on foot.
- Getting there
- Near the hamlet of La Rue-Eon, commune of Concoret, Morbihan; no rail, reached by car or on the forest trail network, roughly 40 minutes from Rennes
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