Clawé Fawe (the nail tree of Foyr)

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.