The Fortingall Yew
Fortingall, Perthshire, Scotland, United Kingdom
Perhaps the oldest tree in Europe, a yew of possibly several thousand years in a Perthshire churchyard, already ancient when the church was built around it.
The yew's age is the stuff of measurement and legend: estimates from two thousand years to five, the church built in its shadow as churches were built at venerated trees, and the tree's great hollowed trunk, once an enclosure large enough for local fairs, now fenced in two remaining halves after centuries of souvenir-hunters' hacking. Its gender made news in 2015 when the famously male tree grew berries, a change botanists found genuinely rare.
The village of Fortingall sits in Glen Lyon's mouth, rebuilt in Arts and Crafts style around the tree and the church, and the glen upstream carries its own stratum of folklore: the Lithian spring, the bridge of Balnaguard, the Fairy Knowe.
Visiting
The churchyard is open daily; the Scottish Yew Heritage Initiative's Fortingall page and the National Churches Trust carry the visit details and the tree's story.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Fortingall_Yew), CC BY-SA 4.0.
Visitor stories