The Linden of Linn

Local legend says that if this linden's shadow ever stops reaching Habsburg Castle, the world ends. The tree is eleven metres round, twenty-five metres tall and roughly 800 years old, which by the canton's own reckoning makes it the mightiest tree in Aargau and would make it a sapling around the time Rudolf von Habsburg, founder of the dynasty the castle is named for, was born. A second legend is more popular and less durable: that survivors of the plague planted it, in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The tree's own dating rules that out by several hundred years. Both stories are worth knowing, only one of them can be true, and it is the tree that settles the argument. Eleven metres of circumference is enormous even for a large-leaved lime, a species that fuses, splits and re-roots itself into fluted multi-stemmed trunks as it ages. What you walk up to is less a trunk than a small ruined building with leaves on top. It stands at the entrance to Linn village, directly at the bus stop, and Aargau's tourist board calls it very popular, which is a polite warning about Sunday afternoons. From Zurich this is a real trip rather than a stroll: train to Brugg, then a local connection onward, 45 to 60 minutes each way.