The Oak of the Swedes

Somebody fixed a small crucifix to this oak, and the reason given for it is the darkest story in the Pays de Bitche. Local tradition holds that during the Thirty Years' War, in 1633 or 1634, Swedish mercenaries hanged the entire population of a nearby hamlet called Kirscheidt from its branches when the villagers would not say where a treasure was hidden. Kirscheidt no longer exists. Nor does any contemporary record of the hanging: the story is repeated locally and in regional history writing, and it stays tradition rather than documented event. The war behind it needs no such caution. Fighting, famine and plague emptied whole stretches of Lorraine in those years, and villages that went then stayed gone. The specialists who have walked out to the tree put it somewhere between 400 and 500 years old. Take the older end of that range and it was already a century old when the mercenaries came through. Take the younger and it was a sapling barely in the ground. It stands about 20 to 21 metres, though one visit in 2012 recorded 25, and nobody has published a girth. The silhouette is twisted and storm-worn, the shape an oak takes after several centuries alone in the open. It is at the roadside between Reyersviller and Siersthal, free, with nothing between you and the trunk.