The Pampel Oak

It stands inside a fenced national park where you have to pay to walk, and both of those facts are the reason it is in good condition. De Hoge Veluwe is 55 square kilometres of sand, heath, drift dunes and planted wood, bought up in the 1910s by Anton and Helene Kroller-Muller and later given to the state. It is enclosed, it is managed, and it is one of the few landscapes in the Netherlands where you can walk for an hour without leaving it. The Pampel is a spot in the northwest of it, off the Houtkampweg. The oak is banded 1850 to 1860, which puts it well before the Kroller-Mullers and inside whatever estate or farm woodland was here first. On the Veluwe that usually means it grew up on land that was heath within living memory, since much of this sand was open and drifting into the nineteenth century and was only planted up afterwards. An oak that establishes itself on poor sand grows slowly and puts on dense timber, so the girth understates the age. Go in October, and let the acorns be the reason. Wild boar and deer here live off them.