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Hrádecký dub

Years old400-440
Girth4.11 m
SpeciesPedunculate Oak

This oak was a sapling while the Thirty Years' War was tearing through Bohemia. Czech Wikipedia puts it at about 440 years old; a Czech tourism site says nearer 400. Neither says how the number was reached, so read it as a range rather than a birthday, but either end of it lands the tree's first years before 1648. What is not in doubt is the size. It stands 28 metres tall with a crown twenty metres wide, on the bank of the mill pond at Hrádek, four kilometres outside Sušice. It has been a protected memorial tree since 1978, and the tourism site, last updated in 2021, calls it a truly massive tree in good condition. The trunk is over four metres round, though exactly how far over depends on whom you ask. The Czech memorial-tree register's figure is 411 centimetres; Wikipedia quotes 485 from a 2012 measurement under the same register number. They cannot both describe the same day's measurement, and if you have a tape and a spare minute at chest height, we would like to know which is closer. There is no legend attached and no famous visitor on record. What there is, is a pedunculate oak that has stood over the same water for four centuries, through wars and a working pond's ordinary seasons, and it still carries a full crown. Czech Wikipedia names two more protected limes nearby, the Hrádecká lípa and the Lešišovská lípa, which we have not yet checked ourselves.

Beside the Hrádecký mill pond (Hrádecký mlýnský rybník), Hrádek u Sušice, Klatovy District, Plzeň Region You can recognise it by its size: a pedunculate oak 28 metres tall, with a trunk over four metres round and a crown about twenty metres wide. It stands on the bank of the Hrádek mill pond.

Free, open public ground on the bank of the mill pond; no gate or ticket

In Hrádek u Sušice village, about 4km from Sušice; no public transport reaches the pond directly, reachable on foot or by road from the village

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