The Bread Tree of Pianello (l'Arbre a Pain)

In Corsica this chestnut is called the Bread Tree, because for centuries its nuts were the bread. The Castagniccia, the chestnut country of north-eastern Corsica, lived on chestnut flour, and the same harvest went to fattening the pigs. This tree has been part of that economy for somewhere between 800 and 1,000 years, the estimate given by the contest that made it famous; nobody recorded when it was planted. Every source that describes it gives the same girth: 15 metres. Read that number with care. The base is thick and knotted with round burrs, a shape very old chestnuts often take, so the tape is almost certainly going round a swollen foot rather than one smooth trunk. Above it the tree rises to at least 12 metres. In 2014 a French jury named it Tree of the Year, and a year later it went to the European contest and finished twelfth. It stands in a communal grove below the village of Pianello, part of some fifty hectares of centuries-old chestnuts that a European research group has been studying for more than a decade, which says the grove is alive and watched even if nobody has published a check on this one trunk since. The pin marks the grove rather than the tree, so expect to walk and look. It is a car journey into the Castagniccia and then a path downhill. If you have stood in front of it and know exactly where, tell us.