The Messikommer Eiche

In 1858, labourers cutting a drainage channel near this oak's roots turned up the first waterlogged timbers of a Stone Age lakeside village, preserved so well in the peat that organic finds nobody expected to survive, textiles, wooden tools, seeds and grain, came up whole. The discovery was significant enough that European prehistory now names an entire Neolithic period after the place: the Robenhausian. Jakob Messikommer, the local peat-cutter turned self-taught archaeologist who found it, later had this oak named for him, and the settlement he uncovered is now one of the constituent sites in a UNESCO World Heritage listing for prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps. The tree itself was already centuries old when Messikommer found his timbers. Seegraben's municipal council placed it under protection in 1914, its first conservation act ever, and bolted a memorial plaque into the trunk in 1927, at the point where it forks into crown. It took a lightning strike in 2005, which opened the deep hollow still visible at the base today. A tree tomography ordered afterward found the wood sound enough to stand for years yet, with a recheck recommended within two or three years. Nothing since has reported the tree down, though no newer scan has surfaced either. Over 500 years old and more than six metres round, it stands alone beside the footpath through the Robenhauser Ried, a protected marsh, with Wetzikon's rooftops visible across the fields behind it.