Fleringen maps one tree: the Kroezeboom, an oak of 7.25 metres round standing on the open ridge of the Fleringer Es. It was planted as a boundary marker between fields, probably between 1500 and 1600, and became a place where border disputes were argued out. Under the Dutch Republic, Catholics held Mass beside it in the open until about 1730, at a small field chapel that still has a successor next to the trunk. Free, with a signed five-minute walk from the parking area.
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Foto: Tubantia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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The Kroezeboom of Fleringen
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 400 to 500 years; some local claims go much higher but are not well supported · Fleringen, Tubbergen, Overijssel
Under the Dutch Republic, Catholics in Twente worshipped where they could, and one of the places they could was under this oak. They kept it up until roughly 1730, at a small field chapel beside the trunk that locals called the hilligen huesken, the little holy house.
The tree was already old by then, and it had a job. A kroezeboom is a Twente boundary oak, a loakboom, planted to mark where one man's fields stopped and the next man's began, and later used as the spot where border disputes got argued out. This one probably went in between 1500 and 1600, which puts it at 400 to 500 years. Some sources call it the oldest pedunculate oak in the Netherlands and reach for 700 or 1,000 years; that case is thin, and the conservative figure is the one carried here.
It is a heavy tree either way, 7.25 metres round on the open ridge of the Fleringer Es. A cast-iron fence keeps visitors off the trunk, and steel supports fitted under the arborist Jorn Copijn in the 1960s and 70s are still visible.
The Sint Pancratius parish of Tubbergen has owned the site since 1916. A timber-framed chapel stands beside the tree, successor to a neo-Gothic one of 1944, and Catholic and peace-movement gatherings have met there since 1970. Park on the Jan van Arkelweg and walk five minutes.
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