The 1700 Oaks of Cannerbos

A baron's coat of arms is the reason this forest has straight lines running through it at all. Around 1700, Baron Daniel Wolfgang van Dopff, who had just built Kasteel Neercanne into the hillside beside it, laid out the slope forest above his new estate as a sterrenbos, a half-star pattern of radiating paths that echoed the half-star on his own family crest, complete with a belvedere, a tea house and a temple of love at the centre where the paths converged. Oaks, elms, beeches and alders went into the ground as part of that original planting scheme. The formal star layout did not survive the 19th century, when neglect let the forest grow back into something closer to ordinary woodland, but a number of oaks along and around the forest's edge are still standing from that first planting, roughly 300 years old today, the clearest physical trace left of Van Dopff's geometric ambition. Kasteel Neercanne itself, built into an old marl quarry, still stands beside the forest and today operates as a restaurant and hotel, while the wooded slope above it remains open, publicly accessible walking terrain.