The Chêne de Cantaure

Around 1870 tenant farmers came to cut this oak up for firewood. Félix Arnaudin, the ethnologist who spent his life recording the Haute-Lande before the pine plantations swallowed it, got word and reached the landowner in time to stop them. He came back in 1899 with a camera, and that photograph now sits in the Musée d'Aquitaine: the same tree, already enormous, more than a century ago. It is a pedunculate oak and it has stood since at least the fourteenth century, which puts it somewhere around 700 to 800 years old. Eight metres round at normal measuring height, eleven where the root flare meets the ground, eighteen to twenty metres tall, hollow through the middle and splitting into two master limbs at a wide fork. Local legend has Pope Clement V pausing near it around 1310. That is legend, and worth saying so. The near miss with the axe was not the last piece of luck. In March 1997 the owner, Michel Harribey, gave the tree and the land under it to the commune of Luë, which has looked after it since, and in May 2011 it took the national Arbre remarquable de France label. In 2019 a film crew used it for a closing scene. It stands on communal land beside a rural lane, three kilometres south of the village. No gate, no ticket, and no bus. This one needs a car.