Ambrosius-egen

A drill bit took three hundred years off this oak. In 1962 it was reckoned to be around 700 years old, the kind of figure that gets onto a sign and stays there. On 13 June 1997 someone bored a core into the trunk and counted the rings, and the answer came back at roughly 400, putting the tree's first year somewhere near 1600. Both figures are still on record. The ring count is the one to believe. It carries the name of Ambrosius Stub, the poet, who worked as a scribe and tutor at Valdemars Slot a kilometre up the road around 1750 and is said to have done his reading and writing under it. By then the oak had already been standing for about a century and a half. The trunk measures just under 7.5 metres round and the tree reaches about 20 metres. Denmark protected it as a natural monument in 1921. Surgeons cut rot out of it in 1973, and rot and fungus are still visible around the base, which is what a working four-hundred-year-old oak looks like when it is cared for rather than tidied away. It stands at the forest edge on Nørreskovvej, on Tåsinge across the bridge from Svendborg. No gate, no ticket, no hunting for it: the road runs straight past.