What is the oldest tree in Liernu?
The Gros Chene, standing beside the church in Liernu, is reputed to be the widest tree trunk in Belgium at just over 14 metres round. Village tradition puts its age near a thousand years, back to Charlemagne, though nobody has measured that scientifically. The trunk is hollow and fissured, and in 1838 someone fitted the inside out as a small chapel to Saint-Antoine Ermite. It has been a protected national monument since 1939.
The oldest-tree-in-Belgium claim travels with this tree everywhere it is written about, and it is a village story more than a measurement: the trunk's hollow, fused structure makes it a poor candidate for ring-counting even if anyone wanted to try, so the age is carried here as tradition rather than as a dated fact. What is documented is the tree's standing in the village. It sits beside the church, the former rectory and a school, and local schoolchildren walk past it daily. The Confrerie du Gros-Chene, a local confraternity, has tended and celebrated the tree for decades with its own annual festival, and Belgium raised it from a 1939 monument to exceptional heritage status in 1992. It also represented the country at the European Tree of the Year final in 2016. The girth figure, just over 14 metres by direct measurement, describes a fused and hollow trunk mass rather than a single clean stem, which is worth knowing before comparing it to a solid trunk elsewhere.
One of Liernu's trees also appears in The Oldest Tree in Every City We Map, a themed collection spanning several cities.