The Multisecular Beech of Saint-Jammes

The town of Sorèze gives this beech a crown ninety metres across, close to the length of a football pitch, carried on a trunk six metres round. It is roughly 450 years old and twenty metres tall, and two of its great limbs now rest on props. It grows high on the Montagne Noire beside the ruins of the Chapelle de Saint-Jammes, a pre-Romanesque chapel of the eleventh century with an old cemetery at its side, on ground that once belonged to the Prats Vieils estate. The spot lay on a route of the Way of St James, so for much of the tree's life the people passing under it were pilgrims bound for Compostela. The chapel is now a ruin. The beech is not, and local tradition has kept its own legends and pilgrimages attached to the place. The prizes came late. The French association A.R.B.R.E.S. named it Remarkable Tree of the Year in 2019, and a year later it placed eleventh in European Tree of the Year with 12,192 votes. There is nothing else out here, which is rather the point: a mountain road, a roofless chapel and a tree that has outlasted the traffic it grew up beside. A light fence guards the trunk itself, so stand outside it and look up. Under that crown, outside is still in the shade.