The Lime of the Wayside Cross, Dachau

The cross at the foot of this lime still carries a prayer for field and house, written when the ground around it was grain fields. The fields are gone. Today it is a street near Dachau Stadt station, and when this tree was photographed in September 2023 the parked cars stood almost up against its trunk. That pairing is the reason to come. The Landkreis Dachau protects the lime as a natural monument, and the photograph shows the tree and the wayside cross together, which is also the easiest way to be sure you have found the right one. The cross has outlasted the farming its prayer was written for. The county list puts the lime at about 100 years, without a date or a method, so read that as a rough band of 90 to 130 years. By that estimate it has stood here through most of Dachau's twentieth century. The list calls it only Linde, a lime, and does not say which kind. If you know, tell us, and a girth or height would be welcome too, since neither has been published. The list places it on Etzenhausener Straße, about 20 metres south of the turning into Prälat-Pfanzelt-Straße, and two map points agree to within a few metres. Look for the cross first. Dachau is about 25 minutes from central Munich on the S2.