What is the oldest tree in Rhenen?
Rhenen's oldest mapped trees are the pollard oaks of the Koningstafel, Sessile Oaks (Quercus petraea) on the plateau at the top of the Grebbeberg. They are documented from at least 1830, and local tradition holds them considerably older.
Dating any single trunk here is difficult, because these are low pollards cut back over and over and some of them stand in circular groupings. The sources disagree and both figures are kept rather than averaged: grebbeberg.nl says the pollards are documented from at least 1830 and are possibly much older, while bomenbieb offers a planting band running from 1200 to 1750. The 1830 record is the safe floor and the earlier dates are tradition. The plateau itself carries an older name story: it became the Koningstafel, the king's table, in the seventeenth century after Frederick V of the Palatinate, living in exile in the Dutch Republic, reportedly used it for hunting feasts and had a large stone table placed there. That is a place-name legend and says nothing about the age of the trees. The ground under them is genuinely ancient: the Heimenberg ring-wall around the plateau is a seventh-century earthwork and one of the oldest and largest defensive structures in the Netherlands. Utrechts Landschap manages the site, which is also a memorial of the battle of the Grebbeberg in May 1940. The hollow lime at Achterberg is dated more narrowly, at more than 350 years.
One of Rhenen's trees also appears in The Thickest Trunks We Have Measured, a themed collection spanning several cities.