The Hammundeseiche
How do I find it? 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.
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, on a clear trunk that runs branch-free for a good height and is pocked with holes where limbs tore out. The dates are worth doing. Recent literature puts the tree at 350 to 440 years, so the village had already been deserted for three centuries before this acorn landed. It grew up alone in the space a settlement left behind, which is why it is freestanding and vast rather than drawn up thin in a wood. Until about 1905 people called it the oak at the Nadelohr. The name it carries now is the village's.
- Species
- Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur)
- Girth
- 8.65 m
- Location
- Wustung Hammundeseiche, Seulingswald, about 3 km northeast of Friedewald, 36289 Friedewald, Hessen, Germany (Seulingswald, the deserted village of Hammundeseiche)
- Access
- 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.
- Getting there
- About 3 km northeast of Friedewald in the Hersfeld-Rotenburg district, reached by road and then on foot along the forest track from Nadelohr.
The button above opens directions in your maps app.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
Discover more
Ticking this one off, walks past several more, and your collection growing city by city: that is the Ancient Trees app.
Get the appIf yours shows it better than the picture above, it can take its place, or stand beside it.
This page was researched from a distance. If you know this tree, you know things we do not: the species, the age, the size, whether the photo shows the right tree, or that it is gone. Every field on this page can be corrected.
Correct a detail on this pageSuggest another tree