An Ancient Woodland Yew

I am fortunate to live in an area where ancient yew trees grow and a visit to a local wood emphasised this point. We had been exploring the woodland, following the boundary, avoiding the plantations and walking the geology, when I recalled the wood has an ancient yew, so a detour made to show Nic. I do not profess to be an expert in ancient yews, however I've viewed yew trees with known planting dates from the 17th and 18th Century and also some of the oldest Yews in the UK. A 300 year old oak or beech tree will turn heads, a 300 year old yew tree rarely merits a glance, by most definitions yew is a slow growing tree. There was a research study of Yews at Alice Holt some years ago that demonstrated the slow growth of woodland yews. The yew we detoured to, is not of the size of churchyards yews, but as a wild yew in a woodland habitat it certainly has an aura of great age.

King Yew and Nic

Nic asked me the history of the yew, sadly I could only recollect some hazy details, it had been possibly a decade since my last visit and a while since I'd rea up on it. I was fairly sure it had a name and some of the ages attributed seemed far too conservative. Viewed from one direction the tree appears of some age, a view from another direction reveals a morphology that hints at a great age. The tree appears to be in a rejuvenating state where new wood is being grown over deadwood, the cause of the deadwood can only be speculated at; disease, trunk collapse, vandalism, storm damage, lightning strike or more probably the capacity of a senescent yew to rejuvenate itself.

King Yew - new wood growing over dead.

On returning home I looked up the tree on the Ancient Yew website, the yew is known as the King Yew and now has some history ascribed to it; a possible boundary tree in an Anglo Saxon charter of land granted in 956 AD by King Eadwig to Bath Abbey. Which suggests that the Yew tree in the 10th Century was of a suitable stature to be assigned as charter landscape feature.