Fortunegen, the Fortune Oak of Dyrehaven

Nobody has written about this oak except the people who measured it. Fortunegen has a name, a gate to be named after and 5.80 metres of trunk, and beyond the Danish tree register's 2010 survey there is no published account of it anywhere we can find. Dyrehaven's other named oaks have their legends. This one has a circumference. That circumference is worth the walk by itself. It works out at about 1.85 metres of diameter, and at the rate an open-grown oak thickens, roughly one and a quarter to two years for every centimetre, it puts the tree somewhere between 225 and 375 years old. That is as close as a tape measure gets. The crown is what you notice standing under it: 24 metres up and badly out of balance, pressed flat along the north side where something else had the light when this oak needed it. It stands east of the Fortunporthuset gatehouse and north of Fortunvej, on the western edge of the deer park, which is the quiet side. Jaegersborg Dyrehave was enclosed as royal hunting ground and the fallow deer are still grazing around trees like this one, wholly unimpressed by anybody walking through. Come in from Jaegersborg rather than Klampenborg; this oak is much nearer that gate.