The Gros Chene of Liernu

At just over 14 metres round, the Gros Chene of Liernu is reputed to be the widest tree trunk in Belgium, and oral tradition in the village puts its age near a thousand years, back to Charlemagne. Nobody has cored it to check, and the tree does not make that easy: the trunk is hollow and fissured, and in 1838 someone furnished the inside as a small chapel to Saint-Antoine Ermite, so the girth reported is a fused, hollow mass rather than a single clean stem. It stands beside the church, the former rectory and a school in the small village of Liernu, and the local children who now walk past it daily continue a habit their grandparents had. The Confrerie du Gros-Chene has tended and celebrated the tree for decades, with its own annual festival. Belgium made it a protected monument by royal decree in 1939 and raised it to exceptional heritage status in 1992; it also represented the country at the European Tree of the Year final in 2016. The oldest-tree-in-Belgium claim is a village story more than a measurement, and this project repeats it as exactly that. Come in January, when the leaves are down and the whole fissured, chapel-holding shape of the trunk is easiest to read.