The hollow King.

Silver, Steel and the Ghosts of Lummen!

There is a rhythm to the road that eventually silences the noise in your head.

Setting off from my home in Mol towards Lommel, I felt the full force of the biting Belgian cold. My body felt heavy and fatigued, making every movement feel like an anchor. But rest wasn’t the cure; it was the road. My Harley-Davidson Road Glide, stripped of all chrome and painted in a stealthy black, became my therapy. With Suzy behind me, we rode through a sun so bright it felt clinical, a light that offered no warmth to the leather or the bone.

We were heading towards a legend: the 1,000-year-old oak of Lummen.

A Dynasty of Survivors

Before reaching the Patriarch, you encounter his lineage. We stopped at the ‘Son’, a 400-year-old oak tree standing halfway to the main grove. It is a veteran in its own right, its branches twisting like muscles under skin. Further away, the ‘Grandson’ sapling is waiting for its century. Then, finally, you see the Patriarch. It is nearly seven metres of gnarled, hollowed-out history.

Standing before it, my own physical exhaustion felt trivial. This tree has been breathing for 800 years. It was a sapling when knights rode these paths. It has witnessed winters that froze the world and summers that parched the earth. It is a living fortress of DNA and memory.

1614: the echo of the ‘Burned Fields’.

The air around the oak is thick with more than just oxygen. This was a ‘gerechtsboom’ (judicial tree). In 1614, this grove was a place of high justice and low mercy.

I stood where Odilia Tsraets likely stood — a woman caught up in the hysteria of the witch trials who was executed in the shadow of these very branches. The land here is still called the ‘Verbrande Velden’ (The Burned Fields). You can almost feel the heat of the stakes and the weight of the judgements in the deep ridges of the bark. Even the controversy in 2017, when ‘modern witches’ fought to reclaim the oak from the Christian chapel, proves that the spirits of 1614 have not fully left this clearing.

The Chapel in the Scar

The Maria chapel is pinned to this ancient, scarred wood. This haunting human touch — a layer of Christian devotion placed directly onto a site with such a dark pagan and judicial history — is powerful. On this cold, bright day, the small flash of white against the dark bark was a striking sight. It represents the clashing souls of the tree: the sacred and the spectral; the prayer and the execution.

The Final Chapter: A Vigil in Silver and Light

Standing there in the biting wind, I realised that the 1,000-year-old oak tree is no longer just a tree; it is a monument in the process of returning to the earth. Looking through the viewfinder of my Leica M10, I felt the clinical sharpness of the digital sensor was almost cruel. It didn’t just show the bark; it showed eight centuries of fatigue.

The tree felt cold. Not just from the Belgian winter, but from a deep, structural chill. It was as if the ‘Patriarch’ had finally grown weary of watching the centuries pass — weary of the witches’ shadows, the clashing prayers at the Maria Chapel and the constant change of the world around it.

The Weight of the Witness

I felt a sudden, sharp urgency to take a photograph. If this tree is indeed taking its final breaths, then my Leica M6 and the Ilford Delta 100 are not just tools for fun; they are instruments of preservation. Every silver frame was a promise to remember. I captured the ‘Son’ and the ‘Grandson’ with a sense of hope, but I couldn’t stop turning back to the old one. He is a hollow king now, his heart gone, yet he still bears the weight of our history on his shoulders.

The ride back to Mol

The return journey was different. The physical fatigue I had felt when setting out from Mol hadn’t disappeared, but it had acquired a new context. Compared to the ancient, frozen stillness of the oak, my own ‘unfit’ body felt vibrant.

As I opened the throttle on the black Road Glide, its roar felt like a defiance of the silence we had left behind. With Suzy holding on tight, the vibration of the machine served as a reminder that it is us who are currently moving through time.

Final Reflection:

We left the ‘Burned Fields’ and the ghost of Odilia Tsraets behind us. I truly hope that, when spring arrives in full, the Patriarch will prove me wrong and find the strength to produce one last canopy of green. However, if his time is indeed over, I am grateful that I was there with my cameras to bear witness to the twilight of a legend.

In photography, we don’t just take pictures; we collect the things that the world is about to lose. From the seat of a Harley and through the lens of a Leica, life looks exactly as it is: beautiful, haunted and brief.

Thank you