What is the oldest tree in Cork?
Cork's oldest tree is the Witch's Yew, a European Yew growing from the limestone of the Rock Close at Blarney Castle, estimated at more than 600 years old. It was voted Ireland's Tree of the Year in 2019 and stood for Europe's in 2020. Blarney is eight kilometres from the city centre, about 30 minutes on the 215 bus, and the yew is inside the paid castle gardens.
The yew predates everything designed around it. When the Jeffreyes family landscaped the Rock Close in the 1750s they built their Witch's Kitchen folly directly beneath a tree that was already centuries old, and the 1446 castle keep most visitors come for is roughly the yew's contemporary, not its elder. Legend keeps the Blarney Witch in it, the spirit said to have first revealed what kissing the Blarney Stone does; the 2019 national vote and its 11,372-vote European campaign the following spring were really votes for that whole story growing out of bare limestone. Yews resist precise dating because their trunks hollow with age, so the 600-year figure is an expert floor rather than a ceiling; the tree could be considerably older. Cork's other remarkable trees are younger imports, mostly Victorian: the beer-funded redwoods and the 1929 Monterey pine of the University College Cork campus arboretum in the city itself, and the 1870 Campbell's Magnolia at Fota, planted from Darjeeling seed six years before Kilmacurragh's celebrated specimen and still flowering on bare branches every February.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.