Yews & zig-zags
Things ancient & pragmatic.
TO SEE THE OLDEST living thing in Britain – and possibly the whole of Europe – take a walk to the village of Fortingall near Loch Tay in Perthshire. A yew in the churchyard has been growing here for 3000 years, maybe even 9000. Its massive trunk – 52 feet around – has split, and the heartwood has decayed (making ring-counting for age impossible), but the tree lives on. And on.
Other yews in Britain have earned thousands of candles on their birthday cakes too, like the one at Ashbrittle in Devon, or Defynnog in the Brecon Beacons, or St George’s in Crowhurst, Surrey, where a door in the trunk opens into a hollow centre where locals once hosted tea parties ( pictured left).
It’s mind-boggling to imagine the history witnessed by trees this ancient, including, the story goes, some pivotal moments. The Ankerwycke yew at Runnymede saw King John sign the Magna Carta in 1215, then Henry VIII woo Anne Boleyn in the 16th century. It’s said Pontius Pilate was born beneath the Fortingall yew.
These trees with their coppery wood, dark-green needles and scarlet berries – known strictly as arils, or snotty gogs in Sussex – are often found in churchyards. Some were planted there, but others pre-date the buildings, and they have long been associated with both death and immortal life. On the one hand they carry fatal poison in their foliage, bark and seeds; on the other of course they live for thousands of years, and their hard wood, once prized for making bows, is said to outlast iron. A yew spear found at Clacton in 1911 is thought to be 450,000 years old.
Popular as a hedge tree (see the letter H on p43), yews grow wild in woods too and in a few places a crowd twist together into a mysterious, shadowy forest. They particularly like limestone and chalk and can be found climbing
the slopes of Hambledon Hill in Dorset and at Kingley Vale on the South Downs near Chichester, which is probably the finest gathering of these long-lived trees in the whole of Britain.
WALK HERE: Download Kingley Vale at www.lfto.com/bonusroutes