The Pastorie Chestnut of Lent

A parish square in Lent doubles as a chestnut's front garden. The Onze Lieve Vrouw Geboorte church went up between 1877 and 1879, designed by the architect G. te Riele Wzn, and the register dates the chestnut on its forecourt to the following decade, planted around the time the church's own rectory rose beside it. The national heritage register's listing for the site still describes it today: an old chestnut tree stands on the square in front of the church, the rectory on its north side. Lent itself has changed more than the tree has. It was a village on the Waal's north bank until Nijmegen annexed it in 1998, and since 2016 an artificial island and a new bridge have turned its riverside fields into the city's newest district. The square with the chestnut sits a few streets back from all of that, beside the road into what is still, for now, a village centre with its own parish rather than a suburb of one. The tree is roughly 130 years old and stands in the open, free to see at any hour, a short walk from Lent's own railway station.