Seasons2 of 4
The thickest oak in Hessen stands in the middle of a village that has been gone since 1312. Hammundeseiche was a real place, a settlement with a church, first recorded in 1141 and abandoned within two centuries; excavations in 1969 turned up the church foundations, an altar block and graves. What is left above ground is a clearing in the Seulingswald, a reconstructed village well, a small pond, and this oak. It measures 8.65 metres round at chest height and 8.77 metres a metre up, which makes it the thickest oak in the state and one of the thickest single-stemmed oaks in Germany. It stands 25 metres tall under a crown 20 metres across. The dates do not agree, and the disagreement is the interesting part. The published estimate, from two German tree books, is 350 to 440 years. A reader who has studied old trees for many years puts it at 500 to 700: nearly every major limb is hollow, the crown has been retreating for about a century, the bark is deeply furrowed to above ten metres, and at over 400 metres altitude an oak grows slowly. “Realistically the oak is between 500 and 700 years old,” they wrote to us in German; “it fulfils every mark of an ancient oak.” Mercator's map of 1592 already marks a notable tree at this spot. Until about 1905 people called it the oak at the Nadelohr. The name it carries now is the village's.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Wustung Hammundeseiche, Seulingswald, about 3 km northeast of Friedewald, 36289 Friedewald, Hessen, Germany
You can recognise it by the ring of lost-limb holes up a trunk that carries no branches for its first few metres, and by the rebuilt round stone village well beside it. It is the only large freestanding tree in the clearing.
Free, in open forest. A forest track runs from the Nadelohr crossing about 600 metres southeast to the clearing, and the Lutherweg 1521 long-distance path passes it.
About 3 km northeast of Friedewald in the Hersfeld-Rotenburg district, reached by road and then on foot along the forest track from Nadelohr.
In fruit
October, when the acorns drop in the clearing
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.