The Gosau Forestry Hill Beech

Most of Hallstatt's protected trees earned that status through age or size, numbers the state could put in a file. This one earned it through shape. When Upper Austria placed the Gosau beech on the natural monument register on 18 December 1980, the reason it gave was neither: die auffallend kugelige Form der Krone, the pronouncedly spherical form of the crown. A beech that grew, by chance rather than by pruning, into something close to a perfect dome. It stands alone on open hillside grass about 80 metres northwest of the Gosau forestry administration building, the kind of unobstructed spot that let whoever assessed it in 1980 take in the whole silhouette at once instead of guessing at it through neighbouring branches. No survey since has recorded a girth or an age, so neither figure appears on this page. A photograph taken on the same hillside in 2015 still shows the shape the register described, the crown reading close to round as a tree's outline gets. Gosau sits partway up the Dachstein valley, on the road between Bad Goisern and the glacier lake at its head, which makes this a stop on the way through rather than a destination of its own. The forestry building gives the walk a fixed point to aim for. The tree is the shape on the hill above it.