Seasons1 of 4
Visitors to this oak do not stand back and admire it, they drive a nail into it. Rub the nail against whatever ails you, hammer it into the bark, and the illness is said to stay behind in the wood. Thousands of nails now stud the trunk and low branches, a folk cure old enough that nobody can say who drove the first one. The tree stands beside a small chapel to Saint Antoine de Padoue along the Sentier des Chats outside Herchies, and the whole roadside shrine goes by the name chene de Saint-Antoine locally. What visitors see today is not the original patient. That oak died and this one was replanted in 1954, so at roughly 70 years old it is young by the usual standard of a project like this. What has not changed is the practice, recognised as Walloon regional heritage since 1985 and popular enough that the oak reached the final six of Belgium's 2019 Arbre de l'Annee. The pin here marks the general footpath rather than a surveyed trunk position, so expect a short walk along the Sentier des Chats to actually find it among the nails.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Sentier des Chats / Rue des Chats, Herchies, Jurbise, Hainaut
You can recognise it by the thousands of nails studding its trunk and low branches, driven in as a folk cure over generations. It stands beside a small chapel to Saint Antoine de Padoue on the Sentier des Chats.
Rural, no station nearby; reached on foot or by car from Jurbise/Herchies village centre
In fruit
September to October: acorns drop, and a good mast year buries the ground in them
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.