FORTINGALL YEW
We came to it in the honey-slow light of a late summer afternoon, when the sun had lost its midday ferocity and slanted long and gold across the glen. The air in Fortingall itself felt ancient, held in the cup of the surrounding hills. It is a place of quiet legends, a village that whispers its stories rather than shouts them. And at its heart, within the stone walls of a kirkyard, is the oldest story of all: the great yew.
It is no longer a tree in the singular sense. Time, wind, and perhaps the slow-burning fire of its own immense vitality have fractured it. What stands today is a congregation of survivors, a ring of gnarled, russet-hued columns clinging to a life that began long before the stones of the church beside it were ever hewn. Its centre is a ghost-space, a holloway through which millennia have passed. To stand within its circumference is to occupy a space where a solid heartwood once was, to feel the echo of five thousand years of growth.
The Victorians, in their eagerness to measure and possess, chained it within a stout iron fence, as if to hold its history captive. But the yew disregards such fleeting gestures. Its life is not measured in human reigns or the founding of nations, but in the slow thickening of its own skin and the patient reach of its roots into the dark Perthshire soil. Legends cling to it like lichen: that Pontius Pilate was born in its shade, a story as wild and tenacious as the tree itself. The truth is deeper, stranger. This tree was a sapling when the first stones were being raised at Stonehenge; it was already ancient when the Romans marched this glen.
I watched the dust motes dance in the shafts of light that pierced its canopy. New life was everywhere. Fresh, green shoots, impossibly vibrant, sprouted from the fissured, time-worn bark. It is not a monument to death, but a testament to endurance. It teaches a different kind of time, a wood-time that dwarfs our own frantic pace. It is a living relic, a being that has weathered ice, iron, and industry, and continues, stubbornly, to grow. Its resilience is its sermon.
As we left, the shadows were stretching, turning the kirkyard into a map of blues and greys. The yew did not feel like a thing we had simply visited; it felt like a presence we had been granted audience with. Its shadow falls long across the memory, a dark, quiet reminder of the world’s deep, slow pulse, beating just beneath the surface of our own brief afternoon.