It’s strange that there are no really ancient yew trees in Ireland.

There are a handful that are reckoned to be 700 to 800 years old, but that’s not really ancient for a tree with a life-expectancy in millennia rather than centuries. But the age of most yew trees tends to be based on educated guesses rather than scientific data. When they’re ancient they are invariably hollow, which makes it impossible to extract cores from them and count the annual rings. Anyway, to my knowledge very few cores have been taken from living Irish trees.

Take the yew that grows in the cloisters of Muckross Abbey near Killarney. It’s always ᴀssumed that the tree was planted by the Franciscans when they built the abbey in 1448, giving it an age of over 550 years. It’s much more likely the abbey was built around a tree that was already mature and well-established, making this tree a lot older. There’s plenty of evidence that in earlier times ecclesiastical sites were chosen on the basis that an old yew tree grew there. There are Anglo-Saxon churches in parts of southern England where archaeological evidence has shown that the tree was there before the church. Some of these churches are up to 1,200 years old and the trees are still alive. Choosing to build an abbey round a yew tree is one of many examples of the Christianisation of a much older pagan belief. There is quite a bit of evidence in folklore and mythology indicating that yews were venerated.

They are our largest native evergreen and, when they grow in mixed woodland, the shade they cast and the toxins they secrete in their root systems create an open clearing — the ideal place for a ceremony. Our ancestors also seem to have been impressed by the fact that they remained green and vibrant when all the other large trees had succumbed to winter. They became ᴀssociated with victory over death. But we also have hard evidence, from bog wood and studies of fossil pollen, that they were once much more widespread than they are today. And the probable reason for their decline is that they were persecuted. Yew foliage is quite poisonous to livestock (and humans) and, while we may have revered yew trees, over the millennia we have shown that we revere cattle and horses even more. There is an ancient yew tree still growing in the Scottish borders and there’s a legend that Pontius Pilate once sat under it. It’s unlikely but not impossible. The tree was certainly mature 2000 years ago and Pontius Pilate, as a Roman civil servant, served on the border between England and Scotland before he was posted to the Holy Land.