The Beech of the Cotrets

The register praises this beech for being straight, which sounds like faint praise and is not. Foresters grade beech on precisely that: how true the bole runs, how thick it is, and how much clean trunk there is before the first branch. Le plus droit et gros de l'ensemble is the register's verdict, the straightest and thickest of the group it stands in, and those same qualities are what put it on a remarkable-tree list rather than in a timber tally. Straightness like this is made by competition. A beech that grows up shoulder to shoulder with others gets no side light, so it spends everything on height and none of it on sideways branches, and the trunk comes out like a column. This one is 104 centimetres across the foot, about three and a quarter metres round down there, on an estimated 120 to 150 years, and the beeches around it are much the same age; only this individual is registered and pinned. It is also barely a walk. Park just inside the forest entrance off the D90 from Houppeville, take the footpath at the back, and the tree is roughly 50 metres in.