The Parish Yew, Leigh Woods

This yew is slowly eating a wall. It grows in a gap in the old stone parish boundary that runs through Leigh Woods, and its trunk has bulged out around the stones and swallowed part of them. The National Trust, which looks after the woods, eventually stopped arguing with it. It took away short stretches of wall on either side to give the tree room, and laid woodchip around its roots. The Trust puts it at approximately 500 years old and calls it one of the oldest trees in Leigh Woods. That is the Trust's estimate rather than a ring count. The Ancient Yew Group, which keeps a database of Britain's old yews, measured the trunk at 4.6 metres round in 2004 and classes it as ancient, without offering an age of its own. It is also what foresters call a maiden tree. Many old trees in working woods were pollarded or coppiced, cut back so they would regrow as a crop of poles. The Trust says this one never was. Whatever happened to the wood around it, the yew has been left to grow in its own shape for its whole life. A parish wall is built to mark a line for good. Here the wall is the thing that had to give way. The tree is stage 2 of the Trust's veteran tree walk, about ten minutes from the North Road entrance.