The Gros Tilleul de Samoëns

Before Samoëns had a town hall, it had this lime. From the sixteenth century the village's council of syndics held its assemblies out in the open under the branches, and the square that grew around the trunk still carries the tree's name: Place du Gros Tilleul. Village meetings are still held there. Local tradition dates the planting to 1438 and ties it to the right of self-government the village had won from Duke Amédée VIII of Savoy seven years before. That is tradition rather than a ring count, so take the resulting 590 years broadly. The tree is less arguable than its birthday: about nine metres round, twenty metres tall, a large-leaved lime with the heavy low frame those get when nothing crowds them for six centuries. Samoëns is a stonemasons' village in the Haute-Savoie, and locals name two things when they name the place. One is the Criou, the mountain standing over it. The other is this tree. It is on France's register of remarkable trees and on the departmental list of classified sites, which makes the ground under it legally protected rather than merely well regarded. It has never stopped being a working village square. No gate, no ticket, and the benches underneath are in daily use.