The Hollow Lime of Réaumont (Tilleul de Réaumont)

In 1891 somebody filled this tree with masonry. In 2000 somebody else dug it all back out. The trunk is entirely hollow, which is ordinary for a lime this old and was once thought to need fixing. It now stands on its own, held by metal bolts with a prop under one heavy limb, and it measures about 9.2 metres round. Visits between 2010 and 2017 came back with 9.05, 9.20 and 9.36, because a hollow, buttressed trunk does not measure the same way twice. It is reckoned the oldest known tree in the Isère, planted around 1390, which makes it roughly 620 years old. Independent sources across a decade give the same figure, which is unusually consistent for a tree dated by tradition rather than by a core sample. Réaumont has organised itself around it. The road was rerouted to give the tree room. A local association, La Maison de l'Arbre, was founded in 2001, and the village has run a tree festival twice a year since 1995. In 2013 it was shortlisted for France's Arbre de l'Année. In July 2020 a visitor described the crown as particularly well furnished with leaves, hollow trunk notwithstanding. Twenty-five minutes on the train from Grenoble puts you at the Réaumont Saint-Cassien halt, and a path across the fields does the last of it.