The Oak of the Virgin at Rannée

In July 2018 one of the candles left at this oak set fire to it. The offerings were back the next day. The trunk is covered from the base upward in small boxed statues of the Virgin, along with rosaries and ex-votos. By local tradition the first one was placed in 1792. Republican soldiers hunting a refractory priest during the Terror are said to have shot a young girl at the foot of the tree when she would not say where he was hiding, and the statuette she had put in a hollow of the trunk stayed there. People have been adding to it ever since. That is the story as this corner of Brittany tells it rather than anything a court record confirms, and the tradition is the verifiable part: the offerings are there, and they are replaced. Both accounts of the fire agree the trunk survived it. How well the crown has recovered since is something a visitor can see better than we can. What is missing is everything a register would hold. Nobody has published an age or a girth, and nobody has settled which oak this is. If you get there with a tape measure or a good eye for a leaf, tell us. It stands at the roadside on the edge of the forest of La Guerche, free, at any hour, about 45 minutes out of Rennes.