Liškiava Lime

Lightning split this lime roughly down the middle and the tree answered by growing back around itself. An arborist who assessed it in 2014 dated the strike to about twenty years before that. Since then dense shoots have come up and closed in around the old mother stem, so the thing standing at the foot of the Liškiava hillfort has no top and no obvious trunk; the naturalist Henrikas Gudavičius described it as looking as though it has no clear trunk at all. The mother stem still measures 6.5 metres round at chest height. No height is recorded, because there is no crown to measure up to. The 2014 assessment put the tree at over 400 years old, and it has been state-protected since 8 February 2016. Before the war a small shrine holding an image of the Virgin was nailed to the trunk, and travellers on the road would stop and bow to it. It was taken down under Soviet rule. Locals do not call it the Liškiava lime but Paklėštarės liepa, from the Polish word for monastery, because a church once stood on the hill it grows beneath. It sits on a stepped slope beside a viewing platform on the road, with the Krūčius bridge a hundred metres southeast and the Holy Trinity church and former monastery on the hilltop above. Most people come to Liškiava for those. Go for both.