1000 year old oak trees are uncommon. This one is just far enough off the beaten track not to make a detour while hacking to or from St. Malo. So, as many of us rarely visit things that are on our doorstep, I determined to go.
Despite having seen a picture, at first sight I was disappointed. I suppose I had been expecting a majestic oak with a thick leafy canopy in the Charles II myth tradition. Leaves it has, but they are not thick. Some branches have none at all and reach to the sky like supplicating fingers. However, with a circumference of 9.65 metres, it is much more impressive close to. It is 20 metres high and I had more of a sense of its grandeur standing beneath it. The bark too is extraordinary, gnarled and warped by time. To my surprise it was also hollow, which I suppose accounts for the intermittent foliage, but also its name.
According to the account as told by the tree itself on a nearby panel, it was seeded in 1144, when Halley’s comet was visiting. This would make it 867 years old, though elsewhere it says that it is 1000 years old. It has lived through the pageant of French history and the anthroproarbric writer singles out various events before arriving at the cataclysm of the revolution.
M. Guillotin was the curé of nearby Concoret. In 1791 the “sans culottes”—working class as opposed to bourgeois revolutionaries—arrived to instil the values of the republic on the eager paysans. Guillotin was in danger so he fled the republican army, who pursued him with sabres drawn. Whether he knew that the tree was hollow, history fails to record, but he arrived at the oak exhausted and terrified, and squeezed inside.
At this point pure fantasy takes over as the tree remembers praying hard for him to be saved. Hey presto, the opening was covered with an enormous cobweb thanks to Notre-Dame of Paimpont, who heard the prayer and transformed herself into a spider. The revolutionaries, seeing the web, assumed that he was not in the tree and left. He stayed on for some time, though the tricky problems of food and personal hygiene are not discussed. Actually the spider legend may be true: I know of one other case where spiders successfully disguised a new constructed cellar wall to stop the Germans pinching the wine.
How to get there
From Josselin, take the D793 to La Trinité Porhoët, turning right after about a kilometre onto the D16 to St. Malo Les Trois Fontaines and Mauron. At Mauron, the road joins the D2; turn right and stay on the D2 to Concoret. (Le Chêne à Guillotin is signposted.) In Concoret, turn right at the ivy-covered church towards Tréhorenteuc and follow the road for a couple of kilometres when you will see on your right the final signpost for the oak.
Copywright Richard Griffiths. First published in the Centrsl Brittany Journal April 2011.
