Skovfogedegen

Ten metres and 42 centimetres around, and empty in the middle. Skovfogedegen has lost its entire heartwood to rot, which an oak can survive: water and sugars travel in the thin growing layer just under the bark, so a hollow trunk is a shell that still works. Three dated Danish sources put the tree here since around the year 1200: the national encyclopedia, the historical-sites database Historisk Atlas, and a 2025 feature in the newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad. That makes it roughly 800 years old, and by a wide margin the oldest and thickest tree on this list. One untraced web page gives 500 years instead. Nothing stands behind it, and the three that agree are dated and named. The hollow has been put to use. Johan Georg Weissler, a Catholic forest ranger who died in 1854, used the cavity as a private prayer chamber in the early 1800s, and skovfoged, forest ranger, is where the tree's name comes from. At other times the hole held peat. The Danish Dendrological Society measured it at 12.9 metres tall and logged it living but weak in 2010. A photograph taken in March 2025 shows the same hollow trunk still standing. It is not a city tree: it grows beside the road Strandvejen at the edge of Jaegersborg Dyrehave, 11 km north of Copenhagen, opposite Bellevue Strand.