The Pollard Oaks of the Koningstafel

The plateau is named after a king who had lost his kingdom. Frederick V of the Palatinate, living in exile in the Dutch Republic, is said to have used this flat top of the Grebbeberg for hunting feasts in the seventeenth century and to have had a large stone table set there. That is where the name Koningstafel comes from, and it is a story about the place rather than about the trees. The trees are the pollards along the west side: low oaks cut back over and over, some of them standing in circular groupings that make dating any single trunk difficult. The two sources disagree about how far back they go and both are kept here. Grebbeberg.nl records them from at least 1830 and calls them possibly much older; bomenbieb offers a planting band running from 1200 to 1750. The 1830 document is the safe floor. The rest is tradition. They stand inside something older than any of those dates. The Heimenberg ring-wall around this plateau is a seventh-century earthwork and one of the oldest and largest defensive structures in the Netherlands, and the Rhine runs below it. In May 1940 the same ground was the battle of the Grebbeberg, and the site is a war memorial now. Utrechts Landschap manages it. Free, waymarked, and about half an hour uphill from Rhenen station.