The Oak of Kasteel Croy

Kasteel Croy is not open to you. This oak is. The castle is a moated house whose oldest parts go back to the mid fifteenth century, now privately run, with offices and a bed and breakfast in its gatehouse, and not generally open to visitors. The oak stands outside all of that, beside Croylaan, the public road leading up to it. The national register of monumental trees lists this tree as council property, visitable and visible, so you can walk to it and stand under it without asking anybody's permission. Its age comes from the register rather than from a planting record: a band of 1850 to 1860, which makes it roughly 170 years old. Our second source is honest but general, a description of the estate's garden and its century-old trees that never singles out this one, so read the date as the register's best estimate rather than a settled fact. If the band is right, the oak went in while the Van der Brugghen family still held Croy, and it has spent its life on a boundary that kept moving around it. Stiphout belonged to the Croy estate until 1968, when it was absorbed into Helmond. The castle went the other way, into the municipality of Laarbeek. The oak stayed where it was, three kilometres east of a city it has never been part of. Nobody has taped its trunk. If you do, tell us.