The Cult of Celebrity: The Fortingall Yew
IN THE EARLY 1970S, an ex-soldier, wanderer and freelance conservationist called Allen Meredith began having mystical dreams. A group of people in long gowns and hoods were sitting in a circle, instructing him to look for the ‘Tree of the Cross’. ‘It was called by another name,’ he remembers, ‘but I knew it was a yew.’ There were doubtless many dreamers of Druidical figures and sacred trees in those psychedelic years, but Meredith acted on his visions. He became obsessed with the yew, began to believe that it held crucial lessons for humankind and, finally, had a revelation that it was the true Tree of Life. Almost single handedly he revived a fascination with the yew – and especially its longevity – that had begun three centuries before. His arguments, together with the evidence he began collecting, persuaded many tree scientists that ancient churchyard yews were older than all previous estimates by some thousands of years; and that one in particular, the Great Yew in the churchyard at Fortingall in Scotland, might be the oldest living thing on earth.
Spending the first half of my life in southern England’s chalk country, one of their favourite natural haunts, I grew up with yews. Their seedlings, planted by thrushes, bristled impertinently on the hallowed downland turf. Bigger trees hunched amongst the grey-trunked beeches like dark Jack-in-the-Greens. Sometimes they grew to maturity, but they never looked old.
Churchyard yews have always seemed different. They have an aura of antiquity, distilled from sombre foliage and dark wood; a sense of being relics or echoes of some forgotten business, even when they are obviously not old at all. There was a yew in the parish churchyard in my home town of Berkhamsted. At 300 years old it was a mere stripling, and our teachers told us that the mound on which it was planted may have held the corpses of the town’s plague victims. They never said why. We’d dash over the miniature barrow for dares, tempting up ghosts and adult disapproval. I had no idea then that yews were once held to have vampiric relationships with the dead, or I would have kept my distance. ‘If the Yew be set in a place subject to poisonous vapours,’ wrote the fanciful botanist Robert Turner in 1664, ‘the very branches will draw and imbibe them, hence it is conceived that the judicious in former times planted it in churchyards on the west side, because those places, being fuller of putrefaction and gross oleaginous vapours exhaled out of the graves by the setting sun, and sometimes drawn by those meteors called ignes fatui, divers have been frightened, supposing some dead bodies to walk.’ (A curious inversion of this belief survived into the twentieth century. A German medical professor at the University of Greiz, Dr Kukowka, claimed that yews emitted gaseous toxins on hot days which could bring on hallucinations in people sitting under their shade.) But our yew didn’t seem a mystical or discomfiting presence, just a rather congenial civic ornament. Stuck in the centre of the town, close to a string of pubs, it was a natural gathering place for revellers on New Year’s Eve, and at midnight during the storm of 31 December 1976 I watched the thin, fluent twigs blowing like black bunting over the crowds in the High Street. Whatever else it might have been it seemed a companionable sort of tree.
Yew is an ancient citizen of the temperate zone, with seven species spread between Asia and Central America. The European species, Taxus baccata, has grown from the coast of central Norway to the mountains of north Africa for a couple of million years, give or take the odd ice age. In Britain, archaeological remains have shown that yews were widespread between and after the glaciations. A 250,000-year-old yew spear found at Clacton in Essex is the world’s oldest surviving wooden artefact. In later periods climate change restricted its distribution. Immense trunks and stumps have been discovered buried in the Fenland peat, drowned by the rising sea levels about 6000 BC. Those on dry land began to vanish as soon as the first farmers arrived 1,000 years later, hoicked out because their toxic foliage poisoned cattle. The syllable ‘yew’ echoes in several European languages – iw and yw in Welsh, uwe in Dutch and if in French and German – suggesting the tree retained some kind of continuity of meaning as settlers moved across the continent. But the persistent and popular idea that yews were ‘sacred’, the revered objects of prehistoric cults, has little hard evidence to support it. There are a handful of Bronze Age rock carvings of what might possibly be coniferous foliage, and some unreliable anecdotes by Roman commentators, but that is about it. Yew does not even figure as a named tree (and therefore an important geographical feature) in a survey of Anglo-Saxon boundary descriptions for the south of England. Yet it was plainly a tree of some significance, as a landmark or meeting place, because hundreds of prehistoric yews are still alive, presumably in their original sites. A few may have survived because of the inaccessibility of their habitat, like the undatable dwarfs clinging to the vertical cliffs of Yew Cougar Scar in the Yorkshire Dales. But most are mysteriously situated in the yards of churches thousands of years their junior, which is at least a circumstantial hint of some past sacred role. These survivors, now their ages are beginning to be understood, represent a serious challenge to many of the assumptions that have traditionally been made about the possible ages of trees. The oldest churchyard yews may well have sprung to life not long after the beginnings of settled civilisation in Britain, and show no signs of approaching demise. But there they continue to sit, topographically entangled with the much younger buildings of our official religion; the wild and serpentine next to the stolid and devout. Whatever ancient dance is going on here between biology and the social order, the yews themselves consistently refuse to behave like solemn monuments, and the existence of these idiosyncratic trees on holy ground poses questions beyond the likely date of their origins, especially why and how did they come to be there.
The first veteran I saw for myself was at St Mary’s Church in Selborne, Hampshire, when I was working on a biography of the village’s most famous son, the naturalist Gilbert White. The Selborne yew was a local landmark, but certainly not humbling or cathedral-like or conforming to any of the other clichés with which the individuality of old trees is so often smothered. It was not even particularly big, except for its massive girth – some twenty-eight feet when it was first measured – and grew modestly on the south-west side of the church. When Hieronymus Grimm made an engraving of it for the first edition of White’s The Natural History of Selborne in the 1780s, he pictured a distinctly stumpy growth, pollarded right back to the height of the surrounding cottages. Two centuries on it was squat and fulsome, with the repose of a country alderman. What I loved most was the interior of the trunk. Old yews are almost invariably hollow, and the inside surfaces of the Selborne tree were patched with a satiny sheen of lilac and grey, like the lustre of mother-of-pearl. It was a cheerful tree. It even had a seat round it, from which to watch the world pass by.
But the yew which trumps them all, perhaps the most celebrated and provocative tree in all Europe, is the Great Yew at Fortingall in Perthshire, located by the Victorian church in this tiny village. The faithful – and it isn’t extravagant to say such trees have disciples – believe it has been growing here for at least 5,000 years. If so, it was flourishing before the making of Stonehenge and the digging of the Neolithic burial chamber at Maeshowe in the Orkneys. The Great Yew is the supreme example in Britain of the mysterious conjunction between ancient tree and sacred site, and the implications haven’t been lost on modern pagans. The Christian church, they suggest, appropriated sites of earlier tree cults, and the presence of an old yew by a church is a sure sign of the Old Religion. In consequence a florid New Age folklore has begun to blossom around ancient yews. The Fortingall tree in particular has become a kind of tree goddess, revered by Druid revivalists, nostalgic wood folk and patriotic Celts. Even some free-thinking Christians have begun to mythologise it. Jesus, the legend goes, visited it during his ‘lost years’. A starburst of ley lines – from the Holy Isle of Iona to Montrose (Mount of the Rose), from Tobermory’s Well of Mary to Marywell on the coast, from Eilean Isa (island of Jesus) and the holy island of Lindisfarne – converge at Fortingall, the axis mundi of alternative Scotland.
The Great Yew, Fortingall, in Perthshire. The circumference of the tree in the eighteenth century is marked out by posts.
Now churchyard yews everywhere are being anatomised, measured, mapped, blessed and danced round. Some acolytes see the species as the living type of Yggdrasil, the Norse ‘World Tree’. A few have glimpsed in the Indo-European root of its name – ‘iw’ – a more than coincidental echo of ‘Iawe’, the Hebrew name for Jehovah, and have christened the yew ‘The Lord’s Own Tree’. It’s a mighty weight of symbolism for a short and rather common tree to bear.
I went to see the Fortingall prodigy for myself one mid March, when the surrounding countryside was still in brown tweed. I knew old yews well enough not to expect a skyscraper, but I was looking forward to the tree frothing over the road, its spring shoots the first new green of the year. What I wasn’t prepared for was the diminutive tuft, no taller than a hedgerow hawthorn, tucked under the lee of the tiny church. Nor for the fact that the Great Yew is in a cage. This is to keep us, the itchy-fingered public, out, not the tree in; at least that’s the story on the noticeboard. When the yew was first ‘discovered’ in the mid eighteenth century, it had a bad time from souvenir hunters, who hacked pieces from the already collapsing trunk until it had effectively turned into two separate trees. By the end of the century, the gap between them was wide enough to carry a coffin through.
Squinting through the bars and reading the captions has become, alas, the ‘yew experience’. You feel voyeuristic, as if you’re peering through a door hole in Bedlam at an inmate slumped in the corner. The yew seems hunched as much by the enclosure as by its own ageing timber frame. The northern half – a sheaf of thick knotted stems, each as thick as a sheep – has a few thinner branches which lope across the pen, and then stop dead at the fence. The southern trunks are propped up by crutches, and here and there by the wall itself. The interior is too dark to make out its texture, and the trunks seem to be regressing to the quality of rock, not wood. But I could see the circle of posts that had been hammered into the ground to trace out its earlier, more extensive circumference. Twenty people could once have joined hands round it.
I tried gazing at the dim-lit scene as a kind of sculptural installation, but it didn’t help. The last time I’d seen trees in a cage was at an outdoor show by the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. He’d incarcerated some dead oak trunks, stripped of bark and already as dark as coal, into a chamber of drystone walls inside a ha-ha, those picturesque ditches intended to blur the differences between the cultural and the ‘natural’. So when you peered down into this man-made crevasse what you saw was not some panorama of the harmony of nature and art, but a vision of the forest cleared for the walled field, and then dumped as a memento mori round its edges. Not an exhibit you would fancy joining hands around, except perhaps in the hope of levitating the hapless trunks free of their prison.
What unnerved me was how dull I was finding the Great Yew. It had none of the panache and power and narrative fascination of deciduous trees one twentieth its age. It had no great burrs where branches had been lopped, no self-pleachings, no cryptic caverns. But as soon as I had admitted this to myself, I realised what a presumptuous reaction it was. Historical aura, visual glamour, legibility to human readers – none of these have the slightest relevance to the tree’s existence, except perhaps to how it is treated.
Near the church is a pub called ‘The Ewe’. Its sign is a sheep’s head and yew berries rampant, a reminder that the Great Yew is now firmly on the tourist trail. I walked towards it along a series of paving stones spelling out which other beings might have passed by the ‘the oldest resident in Fortingall’: ‘Stone Age Man … Picts … Wolves … Warriors … Roman Legions … Worshippers through the ages … And YOU’. It’s another ghastly pun, but true. This commodifying of ancient organisms – only ancient by comparison with our own brief span – is about us. The conundrums of ancient yews – Were they sacred totems, planted by Neolithics? Were churches sited where yew trees already grew? – are seductive puzzles, but are really more about our social preoccupations than the life of the yew. At Fortingall it is as if we can’t see the tree except in our own attachments to it; as if we hope its origins, laid bare, might reveal lost human sensitivities or beliefs. The tree itself, for itself, recedes. It already resembles an inanimate standing stone, confined in a space defined by us and not far off being the next piece of paving in the tourist trail.
Veteran trees began to be specially noticed in Europe during the expansive days of the late seventeenth century. They were ingredients of an increasingly valued nature as well as bits of real estate. It helped that they were rooted to the spot, that they became not just more distinctive with age but positively monumental. Big old trees consolidated place and the long span of history in a way that was rivalled only by big old houses. ‘What can be more pleasant,’ wrote agricultural improver John Worlidge, in 1699, ‘than to have the bounds and limits of your own property preserved and continued from age to age by the testimony of such living and growing witnesses.’ The big trees were items of property themselves, part of what would come to be called ‘heritage’. They were often given human names. There is Wesley’s Beech, Newton’s Apple, any number of King’s Oaks. I was once introduced to an 800-year-old oak in Dorset which was called Billy Wilkins, as if it were a vegetable scion of the local landowning family. But there aren’t, to my knowledge, any yews named after humans. Even the Cumbrian trees in Wordsworth’s famous poem ‘Yew-Trees’ are always referred to as the ‘fraternal Four of Borrowdale’. Yews’ brooding presence and toxic foliage didn’t make them popular candidates as status symbols or the ornaments of pleasure grounds. The realisation that a few big ones, often now in the privileged environment of churchyards, had survived for millennia dawned during the heyday of antiquarianism in the mid eighteenth century. It was the beginning of a familiar process, by which a wild organism is progressively denatured. There have been claims and counterclaims about the meanings of the old yews, but they have one thing in common: the yew is seen as a human annex.
The Fortingall yew was first measured by the naturalist Daines Barrington in 1770, at fifty-two feet in girth. Two years later his friend Thomas Pennant’s tape showed fifty-six feet six inches – demonstrating how hard it is to measure these massy creatures precisely. The two men were correspondents of Gilbert White and had either prompted, or been prompted by, White’s investigations into the tree in his own churchyard at Selborne. He was aware that the yew was a veteran, and thought it ‘coeval with the church’, which dates from the late twelfth century – the good Christian in him perhaps not ready for the implications of it being even older. White assembled the possible explanations about why there should be such trees in churchyards with his customary naturalist’s thoroughness. He thought they might be there to provide shade for ‘the most respectable parishioners’; or a screen from the wind; or to supply faux palm for Eastertide; or, because of their poisonous foliage, to keep cattle out of the churchyard; or, most likely, ‘as an emblem of mortality for their funereal appearance’. The most popular myth, in its blend of patriotism and whimsy, was that they had been grown to provide wood for longbows. This overlooked two important facts: that the less brittle wood of Spanish and Italian yews was preferred for bows, and that they were carved from yew trunks – three or four at the most from each trunk. Result: the chosen tree disappears from the churchyard.
The popularising of yews had consequences in Fortingall. In 1833 the antiquarian Dr Patrick Neill reported an early black market in souvenirs of the Great Yew. Bits of the tree had been cut away ‘by the country people, with the view of forming quechs or drinking cups and other relics, which visitors were in the habit of purchasing’. The nineteenth-century fad for Druidism effected a different kind of filching, an intellectual appropriation. Although there was no objective evidence, Druid revivalists declared that yews had been sacred to the cult, that they had been planted systematically around wells and other sacred sites, and that Christian churchyards associated with yews had been built on the sites of Druidic temples. Godfrey Higgins made the first claim that yews were Jehovah’s own trees in The Celtic Druids, published in 1829.
A different slant on the Druidic theory was given by the geographer Vaughan Cornish in the 1940s. Cornish was a polymath whose interests ranged from the effect of waves on sea-shore formation to the aesthetics and human history of landscapes. In his classic study The Churchyard Yew and Immortality (1946) he accepts that yew trees may have been sacred to early peoples in Britain, but argues that their evergreen foliage made them symbols of immortality, not mortality as White had thought. The Christian Church adopted them as symbols of everlasting life. He is less sure about when this practice might have started, but suggests that the original deployment of yew in churchyards across the English countryside was a custom brought here by the Normans, who had adopted the yew as a northern equivalent of the cypress.
Unlike earlier writers, Cornish had done his fieldwork. He wrote to every diocese in the country about their yews, and travelled to many of their locations to map their positions and alignments. The results seemed to back up his theory. Most of the very old yews appeared to lie in territories in southern England and Wales affected by the spate of church building that followed the Norman Conquest. And their positioning with respect to the church showed a surprising uniformity. The vast majority were on the south side, close to the door used by funeral processions. The coffin would pass by the yew, or sometimes between a pair of them. What Cornish refused to accept was that the individual trees themselves were especially old, or that they might be living survivors of pre-Christian religious sites. The idea of a 2,000-year-old tree, predating not just church buildings but one of the spiritual founders of Western civilisation, was still thought to border on blasphemy, demeaning to both Christianity and civilisation. The Keeper of the Department of Botany in Cardiff told Cornish categorically that ‘there is no proof that any now standing date back to the time of the Druids, and it is quite unlikely that they do’. As for the Fortingall yew, there was a simple explanation given to Cornish by the Director of Kew Gardens, the distinguished Dr Edward Salisbury. The yew was not one tree, but two or even several, fused together. It was a common phenomenon, and ‘the barks at the point of fusion may be completely obliterated with age, and the wood of two trunks may appear as one’ (an interpretation since shown up as false by DNA analysis of different parts of the trunk). So that was it. The yew had been thoroughly explained, neatly compacted both physically and historically.
And there the matter might have ended, with all the veteran yews tidied away as pious bouquets planted at a church’s founding, but for the intervention of Allen Meredith. It would be hard to imagine a man less like the respectable and academic Cornish. Meredith had a touch of the Celtic hedge preacher about him. He’d left school at fifteen with no qualifications, served in the Royal Green Jackets, lived rough for a while, got in trouble with the law. Then, in the mid 1970s, he had the series of mystical dreams with which I began this story. For the next decade he cycled about Britain, searching for the yew’s ‘secret’. It became an obsession, and like Cornish, Meredith did his fieldwork meticulously. He visited almost all the surviving ancient trees, measured them, probed deeper than anyone previously into historical archives, had more revelatory dreams. And he became convinced that the conventional wisdom about their ages was wrong by several orders of magnitude. He drew up a list of some 500 yews he believed were more than 1,000 years old. At Ankerwycke near Windsor, there is a yew of thirty-one-feet girth which, he argued, was the tree under which the Magna Carta was sealed; in Crowhurst, Surrey, a thirty-five footer, which he put at over 2,000 years old; and in Discoed in Wales, a tree much better preserved than the Fortingall yew, but possibly also over 5,000 years old.
These ages can make you giddy, and incredulous. They far exceeded those of any known oak trees, or indeed of most other species on the planet. And they were made problematic by the fact that old yews, at this time, were regarded as almost impossible to date. Most trees go through three distinct stages of growth. For their first fifty to a hundred years they grow comparatively quickly, and the new wood builds up in a series of wide annual rings in the trunk. In middle age (100–500 years) the size of the crown stabilises, the annual increment of new wood remains constant, and the corresponding rings become thinner and more uniform. In old age, the tree may actually shrink as branches fall off or die back, the production of new wood declines, and annual rings become very thin.
But yews are an exception. For their first 400 or 500 years they grow normally, if slowly, and can be accurately dated by removing a thin core from the trunk and counting the annual rings. But at any stage after this they can spring into a pattern of new growth quite unlike any other temperate species. They are not the only tree to become hollow in old age, but one of very few to use this as an opportunity to spring into youthful generative mode again. An old yew can begin bewildering growth spurts in new dimensions. It builds buttresses round the remaining trunk, regenerates new shoots round areas of even catastrophic damage, sends up new trunklets from branches which are low enough to lie on the ground and put down roots. Most dramatically, it can plunge aerial roots down into the hollow centre. The possible consequences of this were first reported in 1837, by J. E. Bowman, one of the most level headed of early yew investigators. Peering into the catacombs of wood inside a hollow tree in the churchyard at Mamhilad, near Pontypool, he discovered that
in the centre of the original tree, is seen another, and apparently detached, yew, several feet in diameter, covered with bark, and in a state of vigorous growth: it is, in fact, of itself a great tree, and overtops the old one. On examination, however, it is found to be united behind, and also at some distance from the ground, by two great contorted arms, one on each side, to the inner wall of its decaying parent.
All orthodox approaches to ageing the trees falter when they arrive at an organic mass that is constantly reinventing itself and not behaving like a senior citizen at all. Even radiocarbon dating, which relies on the fact that all one-time living matter contains the C14 isotope, which decays at a constant rate (its half life is about 5,730 years), is useless with a trunk in which the early age ranges of wood are missing.
But the weight of Meredith’s circumstantial evidence eventually led the authority on ancient trees John White to work out a tentative – though far from definitive – way of dating the old trees. It involved a formula relating the density of the rings in the outer wood to their distance from the centre of the tree. It is not a calculation for amateurs (one stage involves the calculation [dbh/2]2 × π) but it seemed to work quite well when tested on trees whose age was known from documentary records. When it was applied to more ancient specimens, it suggested that Meredith’s informed guesses were roughly right. The big trees’ ages were more like 2,500 to 3,500 years, rather than 5,000, but it still meant they were older than the churches, sometimes by a huge margin. This left matters in a teasingly unresolved state, with the various theories now equally implausible. Could early church architects have so precisely orientated their buildings that they accommodated a large lump of still-growing timber just by the funeral entry door? Is the Celtic origin of yew-bound churches credible, given that no archaeological evidence of underlying worship sites has ever been found? Is it probable that Neolithic peoples were deliberately planting a tree that grew of its own accord in the countryside around? Isn’t it more likely that – if the yew really was sacred to them – they created their holy places next to existing wild trees?
I doubt there will ever be definitive answers to these questions. For many under the spell of Taxus this is not just a search for the history of the yew, but for a kind of spiritual genealogy, a quest for Avalon, for the deciphering of a symbol that shows how we left the path of natural religion.
In the meantime, the trees themselves continue to be just trees, and to demonstrate that their seeming immortality is neither certain nor mystical. The Selborne yew was blown down, aged approximately 1,500 years, in the great gale of 25 January 1990. The vicar’s awestruck description has itself become a piece of local lore. ‘The massive trunk lay shattered across the church path,’ he wrote in the parish magazine, ‘and a disc of soil and roots stood vertically above a wide crater. The bench around the trunk was still in place, looking like a forgotten ornament on a Christmas tree. A stormy sea of twisted boughs and dark foliage covering the churchyard was pierced here and there by a white tombstone like a sinking ship.’ Also by bits of the skeletons of people whose graves had been overtaken by the roots.
After the devastations wrought by the previous great storm of 1987, the locals found the tumbling of one of the South Country’s most celebrated trees hard to bear, and a rescue attempt was mounted. A team of aboricultural students sawed off the top branches and winched the trunk back into the vertical. The children from the local primary school, led by the vicar, linked hands round the risen bole to pray for its survival. It seemed to work. Shortly afterwards, unsettled by all the activity in the ground around it, an underground water main burst, and bathed the yew’s roots in municipal water for the next thirty-six hours. Alas, it proved too much, and the roots were waterlogged. After a few months during which it put out a few wispy new shoots, Selborne’s totem pole expired.
But the tree, echoing its species’ seemingly unquenchable ability to biologically regenerate itself, refused to go away. The village planted a cutting from it just a dozen yards away from its fallow hulk – which itself lives on, by proxy at least. Its hollow shell has been colonised by young hazel and foxgloves, and a honeysuckle has wound its way up the truncated trunk. Bits of the pagan timber found their way into the church, as a hanging cross and an altar screen. People from all over Britain came and gathered fragmentary mementoes of the tree under which they’d picnicked, slept, made vows of undying love. I have a small section of a branch myself, now a bookend on a library shelf that holds Gilbert White’s description of its parent.
In the afternoon of my visit to Fortingall, I walked from The Ewe back to the yew. Its new shoots were foxy with pollen-heavy male flowers. It looked as if it could easily live another few thousand years, but only by becoming a kind of low hedge or a rockery plant, and abandoning the energy-expensive business of keeping a trunk alive. Beings in the natural world – trees especially – don’t often cling to individuality in the way we’d like them to. Their boundaries become amorphous, absorbing and joining with other living forms. The oldest living organisms in the world are probably the subterranean mycorrhiza of ancient forest fungi. They’ve been there since the woods sprang up, tens of thousands of years ago, and live in an intimate partnership with the tree roots, without which neither could survive. The root and fungal tissues are as imbricated as if they were a single organism. The tree supplies the fungus with sugars, the fungus filters minerals from the soil into the tree’s roots. Sometimes these fungal systems stretch throughout a wood as an unbroken network of subterranean tissue, entwined with the roots of most of the trees in the forest, an immense feeding and communication cooperative which may weigh hundreds of tons.
Woodcut of the Fortingall yew in 1822. The tree’s hollowing out into two distinct trunks is clearly visible.
Individual trees, extended by suckering into genetically identical clusters, can also reach vast dimensions. A clone of 47,000 quaking aspens in Fishlake Forest in Utah – known as Pando, the ‘Trembling Giant’ – is, at approximately 80,000 years, probably the oldest mass of connected tree tissue, and weighs in at 6,600 tons. Another famous clonal ‘tree’ is the ‘King’s Holly’ (not a holly, but a member of the protea family, Lomatia tasmanica) which grows in south-west Tasmania. It has flowers but never fruits, and survives purely by vegetative reproduction. Essentially, it takes cuttings of itself. When a branch falls it puts down new roots, establishing a new plant that is genetically identical to its parent. The lifespan of the individual trunks or groups of trunks is about 300 years, but radiocarbon dating suggests the whole organism is at least 43,600 years old, and the surviving 500 clonal groups are strung out in a shifting colony more than half a mile long.
In a different culture the Great Yew might have been able to expand by a similar process. On its far side I discovered a stone in the wall dedicated to a nineteenth-century incumbent of the church. A vigorous branch of the tree was beginning to overshadow it, and would doubtless soon be snipped back to the civic respectfulness of the fence line. One of the mechanisms by which yews can extend their life is analogous to the Lomatia’s self-cloning. The drooping branches, if allowed to grow long enough, can root where they touch the ground, and send up new trunks, which in turn form new colonising branches. The mother tree survives by expansion of the limits of its self. It occurred to me that, without its cage, the Great Yew might by now have loped as far as the door of The Ewe, in a thin green line of new incarnations.
A while later I found a churchyard yew that had been allowed to do this. In the north Wales village of Llangernyw (certainly named after its mother tree – yw is the Welsh-language root for the tree) the tiny church of St Digain’s sports a huge and unfenced yew. It consists of four huge trunks spread out like a fistful of spillikins. It is hard to read let alone measure the tree’s girth. I made it roughly forty-five feet. The official figure is forty-one feet. The age, perhaps optimistically, is put at circa 4,000 years. But the trunks and branches have extended unfettered over most of the churchyard, shading and brushing graves old and new. One branch is snaking towards a patch of bramble, and has made solid contact with the ground. In a decade or so it should have put down roots, and a new clonal offspring of the Llangernyw yew will sprout up twenty yards from the mother tree.