The Fortinghall Yew by Karen Lloyd

It was an afterthought to pay my respects to the yew. I’d been numerous times before and wasn’t sure what was to be gained by making the little trip from the car park to the walled enclosure. I’d parked the car beside the church in Fortingall, a village whose thatched roofs and topiary feel more akin to rural Devon than rugged highland Perthshire, then set off on the bike to ride up Glen Lyon and over the mountain pass to Ben Lawyers. Approaching by single track road the entrance to the glen looks like something from a fantasy novel, impenetrable, but the road narrows again and winds above the precipitous gorge on one side and hanging gardens of rock and forest on the other. Above the gorge I paused by the protective wall and peered over the edge at the River Lyon. Way below, waterfalls rumbled. It was peak salmon-run season, and I wondered if the pools below the falls were flush with the fish whose ecological imperative binds mountain to stream and stream to river and ocean. Beyond the tenebrous light of the ravine, sunlit mountains.

There’d been the usual swirl of anticipation, glad to be out and doing, but tempered as usual by a slight melancholia as I cycled also through memories of coming here over what, thirty-five years or more. First visiting pals in the area, then with the man I married, first one then two kids, holidaying with friends and their kids. And now our boys are away and my husband’s cycling days are done, and for me it’s back to riding solo. It’s funny too, travelling simultaneously into semi-coherent versions of the past and simultaneously speeding – albeit at a sedate 18 miles per hour- into the future.

It was August, and hot; almost too hot. Over the obligatory coffee and scone at Bridge of Balgie tearooms I’d earwigged—actually, couldn’t help but hear—two young men deep in conversation about the Second World War. By his accent I judged one to be Dutch, and by association too from the atrocities he described visited on the country by the German army. As he talked the Dutchman swore, and I didn’t mind, because he was impassioned, and rightly so, and anyway I swear too, so who am I to say, and who’s to say what’s appropriate or not to speak about in an idyllic neck of the woods like this, cut off by a mountain pass one way and a twelve mile stretch of single track road the other? Then the man at the next table who I took for an estate worker went and tapped the young man on the shoulder – there are ladies present – and the Dutchman apologised, though I said I really didn’t mind, then it all began to feel weird and incongruous, what with the sunshine and the River Lyon lazing about in the shallows, the other tourists, the delivery man from Asda, the barn swallows and martins slaloming above the grassy banks, the indolent water. And too, I was happy that the two guys were this involved in the past; that it contained for them truths about who we are as a species, along with where we might be going. A while later they left, and a while after that I left too, setting off up the Ben Lawyers road and there they were, hanging over a gate at the of a bungalow, still talking  animatedly. They waved, and I waved back.

*

I gave up on the mountain pass. Sometimes you have to be circumspect. Because of the increasing heat and because I well know my levels of tolerance (very low) I quit. There was nothing to prove to myself, and anyway the mountain will always be there, enduring, indifferent to us humans; to what we choose to do or don’t. Our little adventures. Our hubris. I rode back down the hill towards the big stone arched bridge by the cafe, the guys gone from the garden. An hour or so later I cycled through the delicious cool of the gorge, past the big estate house, the village hall, the Enid Blyton cottages. At some point in the recent past one of those twee thatched roofs had caught fire and the fire, well, as is its nature, the fire had spread because of the thatch, and who knows when the houses will be restored, or when the folks for whom they are home can return. That’s what life is; a series of uncertainties, sometimes calamities, and if we’re lucky—or so minded—of returns. Homeostasis: that’s also what life is; the process in which every perturbation induces an alignment back to how it is we need to live.

I swung into the car park by the church, leaned the bike against the wall, unlocked the car and left the doors wide to let the heat escape and sat in the shade crunching an apple. When I’d finished, I put the bike in the back of the car. I was about to put the key in the ignition when I noticed someone hunched over by the gate into the Fortingall Yew’s enclosure. A lady, white haired, spry, fiddling with something, wearing a high vis tabard. Nosiness took over. I sauntered up the path, noting the engraved messages that are orientations towards the tree’s venerable age, about kings and queens, worship through the ages, Christians, scholars, explorers, and further back, the time of warriors. Through the protective railings set in the walled enclosure were a couple of supermarket bags for life. There’s a thought, against the great age of the tree. The woman was fiddling with a combination lock. The lock sprung, with a slight creak of metal on metal, the gate opened a fraction.

“Hello,” I said. The woman looked up. She was a good age herself.

“Hello,’ she replied.

“Are you the custodian?”

“I am, yes,” she said.

Unappealingly, I began to gush. “What a privilege!” I said, desperate to say something meaningful, and failing, followed by “What do you have to do?”

The woman seemed pleased to be asked. She lives next door, she said, and checks regularly to make sure all’s as well with Britain’s, if not Europe’s, most ancient yew. At her feet, another bag for life containing a clutter of well-used garden tools, rolls of twine.

“Is this your first visit?” she asked.

“I’ve been coming here since the kids were this small,” I said, waving a hand at the level of my knee. “Or longer, far longer—probably thirty-five years. Nothing compared to the age off the tree,” I said. “How is it doing?”

“It’s doing very well,” she replied, “but I need to replace some of the pegs,” she said, indicating the ring of sturdy wooden dowels set out in as wide a circle as the enclosure allows, a girth of around 16 metres that reveals the yew’s erstwhile circumference. Most of the tree has gone, collapsed under the imperative of who knows how long a life, five thousand years if you believe the engraved paving slab, or even as some experts think, nine thousand. The wall was constructed around the yew back in the mid-1800s, this one replacing an earlier 18^th century wall built to prevent tourists snaffling bits of the tree and locals from cutting off substantial sections and carving them into souvenirs – quaiches and the like – available at a price for the discerning traveller. Records show that bonfires were lit amongst the aged limbs and funeral processions passed beneath an arch in the trunk, but what’s undoubted is that what remains of the yew is a palimpsest, or a warrior yew, sundered by great age.

Four trunks emerged from the needle-dry earth, a slender one here, here a thickened ancient leg bolstered at the points of bifurcation by columns of stone, a self-pollarded behemoth over there. From the dowels you take in the immensity of the yew’s former life. It takes some time to compute, and even then, the mind fails to parse what’s there in front of your eyes – or isn’t.

“I noticed some brambles,” the custodian said, taking a pair of clippers out of the bag and waggling them in the direction of the offending articles, “I’m going to show them who’s boss. The brambles are easy,” she added, “it’s people who are the problem. We’ve had Druids climb over the walls because they say it’s their ancestral right to be with the tree. I heard them one night. Had to come out and chase them away.”

“Where’s the respect!” I said, then probably added something about entitlement and selfishness.  “What about its age?” I asked, “You read all these different accounts. What do you think?”

The custodian rose to the subject. “The idea that it’s five or nine thousand years old is complete rubbish. Now they think it’s much younger, maybe one or two thousand years old old. The Royal Forestry Society and Ancient Yew group discounted those other ideas a few years back.” I’d noticed the custodian’s dayglo tabard was official Ancient Tree Forum gear, and I suppose with that comes a certain kudos, but still, I wanted the tree to be older; much older.

“People can’t help but exaggerate,” she said, “and that business about Pontius Pilate being born here – that’s all rubbish too.”

“It was probably here when St Adamnan arrived in the glen,” the woman continued, “so it’s at least concurrent with the arrival of Christianity.” I chipped in what little I knew about the saint from the interpretation board in the village down the road. Dull, it’s called, though with the generous views across Strath Tay, it isn’t. Adamnan I knew to be Columbus’ biographer and a founder of the first church on Iona. As an elderly and dying man, they say he was carried east on a bier of woven willow. Where the first willow-stem breaks, Adamnan said, bury me there. But the story is probably apocryphal too. That’s history for you. Bits and pieces coming through the ether, the rest speculation or fable.  How different to the history taught us in year 7 by insane Mr Dickinson who drove home historical facts to our barely-fused skulls by thwacking us across the head with a ruler at horribly regular intervals. A shadoof is a means of irrigation in Egypt, or whatever it was, filling in the blanks on the handouts. Who knows how old they were. Centuries, probably. Then you think, according to the words carved into the path, the yew is more ancient than the pyramids!

The woman rootled in the bottom of the bag.

“I’ve forgotten the trowel,” she said, looking me in the eye. “Could you stay here for five minutes whilst I nip back for it? Don’t let anyone inside!” And she was gone, travelling back through the ages along the path to the twenty-first century.

*

What do you do when you’re suddenly responsible for the life of a venerable tree, the ur-tree? There was the padlock, sprung, and there was the gate, open, and there was the Fortingall Yew. I can’t say I wasn’t tempted to go inside the enclosure. Who wouldn’t be tempted? And there on the ground were the new dowels ready to replace the few that had rotted away, and there was the lacuna where the yew now wasn’t, sunlight filtering through the crown spilling over and through the protective walls, the viridian needles as deeply vigorous as anything alive, the convoluted branches, the two bags for life, one lime, one orange and purple: all I had to do was push the gate, and I was in. I could snatch a Fortingall Yew trophy, keep it on a shelf at home, but if I did, I’d have to keep schtum. Oh that; I picked it up in the woods. Maybe I’d have kneeled in obeisance at the yew tree altar; asked the tree to cleanse me of my human sins, but the list would be very long, and the custodian would be back any minute. What’s a few decades, I thought, the memories, the kids splashing about in the edge of the river, the teenage years when they demanded every time the walk to abandoned Taymouth Caste which was mired in stories of money-laundering but recently reinvented as a gazillionaire’s project for the super-rich, the company responsible buying up yet more land and properties, leaving them empty, closing down small businesses because they didn’t fit the zeitgeist. Such is the prerogative of the uber-rich in the twenty-first century; sun-kings all, never done with the getting and spending; lording it over those for whom the place is not, actually, some transitory ‘experience,’ but home. Watching an osprey twist towards the Lyon—a meteorite, burning—pulling a salmon from the incredulous pool, the fish all fighting muscle, the osprey correcting, locked on to somewhere, beads of water falling, refracting; the deer mangling a hind leg on the wire fence and struggling to get away and me incanting oh god, oh god, because if I hadn’t startled it the deer it wouldn’t have attempted the fence and the closer I got, the worse she fought. What’s all this, against the primordial, rooted, living, dying, stupefying Fortingall Yew?

*

The custodian walked back up the path. “I’ve got it,” she said, brandishing the trowel. Then a man and young girl arrived and the man proceeded to tell the custodian things about the tree and the custodian was scrupulously polite and when he’d finished and turned to go, she called “Bye-bye, and thank you for the information.” Our eyes met for a moment. I’m pretty sure we each knew what the other was thinking.

“I took a dead branch off last week,” the custodian said. “I don’t do that very often.” But what did you do with the branch? I didn’t ask. We talked about the history of the tree and the place, about the graves in the field to the west, the standing stones, that the yew is a marker of ancient practices, not religion, she said; “We can’t possibly know what they practiced.” (Yes – and not even the breaking and entering Druids knew!) That the church was founded around 700 AD (a mere 700 years!) and like most old churches no doubt supplanted a much older ceremonial place, because that is what the presence of ancient yews infers.

A woman in a blue dress looked at us through the adjacent railings. She called over. “I love this tree. I come whenever I’m here. Keep talking – I want to know more!”

And there was more. That there’d been an early Christian monastery here, then the original church, and that the original church bell had been stolen, its whereabout still unknown. “I’m sure it was stolen to order,” the custodian said. That the yew was male because it doesn’t produce berries but small spherical, pollen-producing cones. That parts of the yew had been harvested recently by scientists at Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens, grown on and planted in the Yew Conservation Hedge Project, because the DNA of venerable trees are receptacles, or libraries, of the history of longevity, as well as ideas about the meaning of life and death. Just when you think you know it all, when there’s no need to come and pay your respects, you discover that the Fortingall Yew is the tree that keeps on giving, and it’s even up to speed with sexual politics too because of late part of the crown went against, or with, the grain, producing berries and thus becoming female: who knew, a non-binary tree! And some tree experts say that the tree wasn’t one but a number of trees growing from the same earth, but then others say that ancient yews split apart like this and put out new limbs to avoid being sundered by their own inestimable weight.

The woman in the blue dress said, “There’s so much to learn! But whenever I come here, I feel the air around the tree is so fresh, the atmosphere so peaceful.” And the custodian replied, “I know exactly what you mean,” and without a shred of the unbearable weight of responsibility, pushed the gate and in she went to minister to this stoic, beneficent being.

I’m not one to gush over whether venerable trees, or any tree for that matter, radiate certain energies or atmospheres, but I do know that hanging around in woods makes me feel better than not. (As for ‘forest bathing,’ isn’t that just another way of monetising something most of us have known for ever?) And like other venerable trees, the Fortingall Yew isn’t done yet; it could live for centuries more. However long it does, people will come, the folks who happen upon it for the first time or return because there’s something about the way it endures that draws them back again and again. Too, it presides over an ecosystem of its own making, a world for other living things, for robins and chaffinches and the redwings drawn by that recent bewilderment of red berries, for the mosses and lichens and the insects that are here because the tree is both living and dead. Standing in the shade of the Fortingall Yew then, I’m in the presence of an unfathomable object, a custodian of so much we know and so much more we cannot. Into the space where the tree is and was we can pour forth our truths and myths about who we are as a species and where we might be going. In an age of information overload, that is a good and entirely useful thing.

***

Karen Lloyd is the author of The Gathering Tide (Saraband, 2015) and Abundance: Nature in Recovery (Bloomsbury, 2021), which was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. Karen’s work has been published internationally including in the Guardian, LitHub, The Ecologist and Dark Mountain. She is a contributor to the anthology Future Rural. Her latest book is Earthworks: Land and Nature in Uncertain Times (Saraband, 2026), from which this essay is an extract.

The photograph at the head of this essay is by the author.