The Kopfulme in der Beerlage

You can stand inside this elm. The trunk of the Kopfulme in der Beerlage is hollow all the way through, with an opening you can step into, and the tree is still alive around you. Kopfulme means head-pollard elm. For generations this European white elm was cut back to a stubby head, the old way of taking wood from a tree without felling it, and that is why it grew short and wide rather than tall: 5.56 metres round when it was last measured in 2020, and only about twelve metres high. The bark has swallowed the remains of an old pasture fence, so the tree carries its working life on its skin. How old it is depends on the source. The tree register that follows it says about 300 years. A 2011 profile put its planting near 1650, give or take seventy years, which, if that date holds, puts it in the ground within a lifetime of the Thirty Years' War. Roughly 350 is the honest middle, and the band is wide on purpose. It stands beside a signed footpath on the Steinfurter Aa, outside Billerbeck, protected as a natural monument by the Coesfeld district. The crown sits low and needs cutting back again, which for a pollard is less a threat than a return to habit. One of the people who keeps a German tree register calls it his favourite tree of all. Step inside and you will understand him.