The Pear Tree of the Walserfeld

Charlemagne, the legend says, sleeps inside the Untersberg, and when he wakes he will ride out to a pear tree on this field and fight the last battle between good and evil. The tree has had to be replaced rather often while it waits. A pear on the Walserfeld is on record from 1564. Chamisso wrote a ballad about it in 1831, and in 1848 King Ludwig of Bavaria tried to buy it from the farmer who owned the field. On the night of 30 April 1872 somebody sawed into it, and a storm brought it down a week later. Its successor, planted in 1875, fell to another storm in 1883. The pear planted in 1887 outlived a Nazi recasting as a Germanic assembly tree and an American plan to fell it after the war, dropped, Wikipedia records, once they saw how unimposing it was. Fungus finished it, and it came out on 7 December 2015. The tree standing now is a replacement, and a young one: a perry pear of the Rote Pichlbirne variety, bought from an Upper Austrian nursery years in advance and already about thirty when it went in late in 2015, roughly 300 metres from the old spot. It is not a protected monument. It holds a post that has outlasted every tree appointed to it, and it is on the municipal coat of arms. It stands opposite the monument to the 1800 Battle of the Walserfeld.