The Pollarded Poplar of Rochapea

Somebody cut the top off this poplar, and it grew to 26 metres anyway. Navarra's river-park register lists it as a trasmocho, a pollard: a tree beheaded at height so the regrowth can be cut again and again for firewood, fence posts and fodder. That is farm work rather than landscaping, and it means this trunk was earning its keep long before the banks of the Arga became a park. The register puts the trunk at 150 centimetres across, which works out at roughly four and a half metres round, and the 2013 survey that recorded it measured the height at 26 metres. Pollards are usually squat things. This one is not. It stands on the riverside walk through Rochapea, the low district by the water where Pamplona came down from its walls to do its washing while the old town kept to the ridge. The path is free and open at any hour. Two things we cannot tell you. Only the Navarra register describes this tree, so there is no second account to check it against, and that survey is now over a decade old. And nobody has recorded an age. Cutting a tree's head off scrambles the usual way of reading how long a poplar has stood, so we are not going to guess at one. If you know more about this tree, tell us.