Le Châtaignier du Rond de Condé

The people who planted this tree lived in a forester's house at the Rond de Condé. The house is gone. Their chestnut is 22.3 metres tall. It is also an outsider here. The Forêt de Senonches runs roughly three quarters sessile oak and a fifth beech, and sweet chestnut barely features: the local forest association, which keeps the map of the forest's remarkable trees, calls this one of very few chestnuts in the whole forest. Its trunk measures 1.13 metres across, about 3.55 metres round. Nobody has dated it. The association's own entry says only that it was probably planted more than a century ago, by the people in that vanished house, and puts no number on it. Its neighbours on this walk both carry ages to the year, so the gap is conspicuous rather than typical. If you know when it went in, tell us. October is when it earns the detour. Sweet chestnut drops spined burrs, they split on the ground, and the tree stands at the picnic area at the Rond de Condé rather than off in the timber, so the harvest lands where people sit. The waymarked venerable-trees loop comes through here, and the five-trunked Chêne Fauteuil is a short walk away at the same junction. Most visitors come for the oaks and find this instead.