This chestnut was cut to a stump by shelling in the First World War, and what grew back from the surviving roots was not one trunk but four. The site was planted around 1860, when Ieper's old fortifications became a public promenade, but the town was shelled flat between 1914 and 1918 and the tree went down with everything else. The four trunks standing today are regrowth off that stump, fused at a base that now measures nine metres round. The second death sentence came in 1940. Wartime fuel shortages sent people across Ieper looking for firewood, and a four-trunked chestnut on a slope above the Menin Gate was an obvious target. It was spared, per the city's own account, because felling it risked dropping trunk onto the houses on the slope below. It is reported to be one of only two Ieper trees to have lived through both wars on the same spot. None of this makes it an old tree. Whatever survives from 1860 is root rather than wood, and the trunks above ground are at most as old as the armistice that let them grow. What makes it worth the stop is what it has already outlived twice, on a walking route the city has built an audio guide around, minutes from the Menin Gate. It won Belgium's own Tree of the Year in 2020, then placed twelfth at the 2021 European final with nearly 31,000 votes.
On the Vestingen (Ieper fortifications) walking route, on the slope beside the Menin Gate, Ieper You can recognise it by its four fused trunks rising from one wide base, on the fortification slope just below the Menin Gate.
Free. Stands in the open on the public Vestingen fortifications walking park that rings Ieper, beside the Menin Gate; the City of Ieper runs a public audio-guide stop here (Dutch and English) as part of its heritage walking route, no ticket or permission needed.
Ieper railway station, roughly a 15-minute walk east via the town centre and Menin Gate.