The Witch's Ash

Lithuania's thickest ash looks like four trees knotted together, and by local tradition it once was. A witch is said to have bound four saplings with her scarf, and the lump on the trunk is where the knot sat. A second version has a woman lured out at night by witches, falling asleep against the tree, and a witch hurling a loaf of bread at it in fury when the roosters crowed. That loaf left the lump. Both are stories rather than history. What is real is the shape, one trunk that reads as several grown into each other, which is where the name Raganos uosis, the Witch's Ash, comes from. The numbers are 7.41 metres round in a 2016 survey and 7.30 in an earlier one, 32 metres tall, with a crown 27 metres across. Over 200 years old, which is a long life for an ash. It had already passed its natural maturity when a storm in 2008 broke its central trunk, and it carried on regardless. It grows in the old manor park at Plateliai, on the lake shore inside Žemaitija National Park, and it is a fixed stop on the park's main excursion route rather than something you have to hunt for. The state protected it in 1960 and made it a nature monument in 2000. Plungė is 13.6 kilometres away, so this is a drive, not a walk from town.