Kuppelegen, the Dome Oak of Dyrehaven

A Danish walker who went out specifically to see Dyrehaven's giant oaks wrote up the trip and admitted he could not be certain which tree he had been standing under. Kuppelegen has a near neighbour of similar size, Stokkerupegen, and in a deer park full of enormous freestanding oaks that is an easy mistake to make. Take his account as support rather than proof. The reliable fix is the register's, whose surveyors logged this position in May 2008. The name is the clue that separates it. Kuppel means dome, and the crown is the reason: 17.2 metres tall over a trunk 8.63 metres round, which is a wide tree carrying a rounded top rather than a tall one. Trepileegen, a hundred metres east, is thicker by 27 centimetres and four metres taller, so the two read quite differently once you see them together. Nobody has dated it. The 8.63 metre girth works out at roughly 2.75 metres through, and the growth rates applied to open-grown oaks put that between about 350 and 550 years. That is a calculation rather than a record, and the band is wide because the honest answer is wide. Red, sika and fallow deer share the park with it, which is why the ground beneath these oaks stays open and grazed short.