The Beeches of Roche Fouet

Several beech trunks have come up inside the walls of a ruined castle, and the walls are losing. The forest register describes them as imbriques, interwoven, with the remains of the chateau de la Roche Fouet on the hillside above the Seine near Orival, which is the whole reason to walk up here. What the stone was before it fell we cannot yet tell you: the ruins are named by the register and nothing more, and the local archaeology deserves a better source than we have found. The trees themselves are young. Forty to sixty years, by the register's estimate, which puts them level with the Five Brothers as the youngest trees on this page, and slender with it: 22 metres of height on trunks around 40 centimetres through, the shape a beech takes when it grows up crowded and races everything around it for the light. This is not a veteran to stand under in awe. It is a group of ordinary young beeches in a genuinely strange place, which is a different pleasure. The Troglodytes circuit runs past it, waymarked, free, through the Orival hillside above the river. The path climbs and drops; wear proper shoes.