The hollow inside this oak is said to hold eight people. A lightning strike, reportedly in the nineteenth century, split the trunk and left a hollow with three openings, and visitors have been carving their names into it since at least 1886. The trunk is more than nine metres round, between 9.2 and 9.4 depending on who held the tape, which makes it the second-thickest ancient oak in Latvia and in the Baltic states. It is sixteen or seventeen metres tall, with a crown about nineteen metres across, and it stands beside the Kaņepju farmstead outside the village of Jērcēni. How old it is depends on whom you ask. The figure most often quoted is anywhere from 450 to 800 years. A dendrochronological study by S. Salins went further and dated it to around 1200, the years when Bishop Albert was pushing into Livonia, which would make it roughly 825. Both numbers are in circulation and nobody has settled it. The state settled something else. Latvia lists the oak on its register of archaeological monuments as a cult site, a tree believed to have been sacred before Christianity reached these fields. Latvians had already crowned it once: in 1933 a competition run by a leading Latvian publication named it the mightiest oak in the country. The farmstead beside it is private. The oak is signposted as a sightseeing object, and the approach to it is open to anyone.
Beside the Kaņepju farmstead, roughly 1.2-1.8km northeast of Jērcēni village centre, Jērcēnu parish, Valmiera municipality, Latvia You can recognise it by the lightning-split trunk, over nine metres round, with a walk-in hollow opening in three places. It stands beside the Kaņepju farmstead, about 1.5 km northeast of Jērcēni.
Free, a signposted 'turisma apskates objekts' (tourism sightseeing object); stands beside a private farmstead but the tree itself and its approach are treated as a public heritage site, not part of the private yard.
Rural Jērcēnu parish, no rail; reached by road, roughly 1.5km from Jērcēni village and about 25km from Valmiera.