Schenklengsfelder Dorflinde

In the heatwave of 2018 the village fire brigade pumped 100,000 litres of water onto this tree. At 17.91 metres round, measured on 15 July 2007, it has the largest trunk circumference of any tree in Germany, and it may be the country's oldest broadleaf, so the water was not sentiment. It is also only about 10 metres tall, the crown having come down over centuries. What stands now is four separate living trunk sections around the rim of what was once a single stem, like the wall of a ruined tower, carried by a wooden scaffold of some 80 beams running roughly 65 metres. The scaffold is half the reason to come. The age is genuinely unsettled and we are not going to settle it here. A stone marker added in the twentieth century gives a planting date of 760, which would mean about 1,270 years and which is a claim rather than a dating. Published estimates run from 600 years to over 1,300: Froehlich in 1990 said over a thousand, Lenzing in 2005 said 1,200 to 1,300, other literature 600 to 1,000. What is documented is the work it did. Schenklengsfeld held its court under this lime without a break from 1557 to 1796 and intermittently afterwards, and the market and the dancing happened here too, with a pillory once standing nearby. Restoration crews came in 1976, 2009 and 2020.