The Oak in Hunebed D42

The oak is standing in the middle of the tomb. Hunebed D42 is one of the larger megalithic chambers in Drenthe and one of the less visited, which is part of why this happened. Five thousand years ago people here dragged glacial boulders into a chamber and covered it with earth. Somewhere around 1880 an acorn got into the middle of it and nobody took the seedling out. The register describes the result plainly: an enormous oak in the middle of the hunebed, which it calls a striking sight, and says the whole picture makes it worth a visit. That is unusually enthusiastic for an official survey and it is right. What you get is two kinds of permanence in one frame. The stones have been there since before writing, before the wheel reached this part of Europe, before bronze. The oak has been there for a century and a half and is, in tree terms, not old. Standing between them rearranges your sense of both. An oak's roots in a chamber tomb are not neutral, and that tension is part of what you are looking at. It is off the Schietbaanweg, northwest of Emmen.