Tilleul de Macon

Twelve wooden posts hold this lime up: eight round the outside, four within, all of them standing on stone footings and last rebuilt in 1988. The tree is pruned every late autumn into three tiers of shrinking width, roughly eleven metres across at the bottom, about half that above it, and a terminal cluster at seven or eight metres up. It is a shaped tree, and it has been one for a very long time. It went into the ground in 1714, and even that was a replacement. A lime stood on this spot in the fifteenth century and is named in the Besogne de Chimay of 1603. So the square at Macon has had a tree at its centre for at least six hundred years, and the one standing there now has held the post for about 310 of them. Belgium classified it as a protected monument on 16 September 1942. Wallonia added it to its patrimoine exceptionnel in 2016, and in 2014 the ground beneath it was decompacted and its root zone protected, which is the unglamorous work that keeps a village tree standing. Because it is pruned and propped rather than left to run, there is no single trunk measurement on record for it. It stands on the Place Yvon Paul, on the south side of the church, free to walk round at any hour.