The Beeches of Roche Fouet
roughly 40 to 60 yearsEuropean Beech
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.
The button above opens directions in your maps app. No public transport reaches the tree directly. By car: park at the entrance to the forest on the Les Essarts side (parcelle 150) and follow the waymarked 'Les Troglodytes' path; sturdy footwear needed, the path climbs and descends. Sits above the Seine near the Orival oppidum site.
- Species
- European Beech (Fagus sylvatica)
- Age estimate
- roughly 40 to 60 years
- Location
- On the waymarked 'Les Troglodytes' circuit, within the ruins of the Roche Fouet castle site, parcelle 458, Foret domaniale de La Londe-Rouvray (Foret de La Londe-Rouvray, near Orival / Les Essarts, overlooking the Seine)
- Access
- Free, public ONF-managed forest, no restrictions. Waymarked as part of both the official 'arbres remarquables' trail and the local 'Les Troglodytes' walking circuit through the Orival hillside.
- Getting there
- No public transport reaches the tree directly. By car: park at the entrance to the forest on the Les Essarts side (parcelle 150) and follow the waymarked 'Les Troglodytes' path; sturdy footwear needed, the path climbs and descends. Sits above the Seine near the Orival oppidum site.
Trees nearby
Ticking this one off, walks past several more, and your collection growing city by city: that is the Ancient Trees app.
Get the appThis page was researched from a distance. If you know this tree, you know things we do not: the species, the age, the size, whether the photo shows the right tree, or that it is gone. Every field on this page can be corrected.
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