Les Trois Frères

Officially there is one tree here. It looks like three. Les Trois Frères is a cépée, three sessile oak stems rising from a single stool, and France lists it as a Remarkable Tree on that strength. The figures were taken in 2010: 325 years old, 32 metres tall, 5.5 metres round at chest height, 1.75 metres through. Age that forward and the brothers are coming up on 340, which puts their first season in the 1680s, while the court was still moving into Versailles. The forest around them is roughly three quarters sessile oak and a fifth beech, and these three stems are among the handful of trees in it that the foresters name individually. They are also the cheap one on this walk. Where the five-trunked Chêne Fauteuil sits ten minutes into the trees behind a safety perimeter, the Three Brothers stand at the Rond d'Angoulême, a junction on the edge of the D941, so you can be looking up 32 metres of oak a minute after leaving the car. The waymarked venerable-trees loop through the Forêt de Senonches runs past them and on to the Fauteuil, a ring of giant sequoias at the Rond de Monsieur and a solitary sweet chestnut at the Rond de Condé: 11.6 kilometres, four stops, and this is the one to start with if you only have an hour.