Jalhay sits on the edge of the Hautes Fagnes, and its best-known tree is the largest multi-trunk oak in Belgium. Les Sept Frères de Gospinal was cut back in the eighteenth century and regrew as seven fused trunks, 7.67 metres round; one is now dead. A short walk through the same forest finds Clawé Fawe, a beech villagers once drove nails into to cure a toothache, at the same old communal border. Both stand on trails near the Hautes Fagnes, free to reach on foot.
0 of 2 visited in Jalhay
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 300 years · Gospinal (Jalhay), Province de Liège
A nineteenth-century lawyer who owned the Gospinal estate received his clients inside this oak. There was room. Cut back in the middle of the eighteenth century, it regrew as seven trunks that have since fused into one body 7.67 metres round, the largest multi-trunk oak in Belgium, and the reason it is called Les Sept Frères, the seven brothers.
It did other public work too. Officials of the communes of Sart and Jalhay used it as their meeting point when they argued out where the boundary between them ran.
The measurements are recent and they agree with each other. The ministerial order that made it a protected monument in 2012 records a girth of 7.44 metres; a visit in 2021 measured 7.67 at seventy centimetres from the ground, roughly a centimetre a year of new wood in between. It stands 26 metres tall. Wallonia had already classified it as a remarkable tree back in 1987.
The sign on site is blunt about the rest: over 300 years old, and nearing the end of its life. One of the seven trunks is dead and the others carry old wounds, though the account of that 2021 visit describes the canopy as still vibrant. Both of those things are true at once.
It stands opposite the Gospinal forestry house, on the walking trail between Jalhay and Solwaster near the Hautes Fagnes.
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · Foyr (Jalhay), Province de Liège
People drove nails into this beech to get rid of their toothache. The idea, common across the Ardennes, was that the ailment passed out of the body and into the wood, and the name Clawé Fawe, the nailed beech, records what the tree was for.
It had other jobs, most of them grimmer. It marked the boundary between Jalhay, which answered to the Prince-Bishop of Liège, and Limbourg, which answered to the Duchy of Brabant, two communes with a long history of not getting along. And it stood at the site of Jalhay's gibbet. The present tree replaced an older one that did the same work, until the French cut it down at the end of the eighteenth century.
Belgium has around 59 known nail trees, 33 of them in the province of Liège, and this is one of the named ones. It is a European beech, 3.79 metres round at chest height when it was measured in July 2013.
It stands at a forest crossroads north of the hamlet of Foyr, on marked walking trails between Jalhay and the Hautes Fagnes, a short way through the same woods from Les Sept Frères. The two sources that place it disagree by about a hundred metres, so the pin gets you to the right patch of forest and the crossroads does the rest.
Nobody has published an age for this beech. If you know when it went in, tell us.