The Witch's Yew

In 2019 the Irish public voted this yew the country's Tree of the Year, and the next spring 11,372 Europeans backed it for the European title. What they were voting for is a tree growing where no tree should: straight out of the top of a limestone outcrop in the Rock Close, the strangest corner of the Blarney Castle gardens. Experts put it at more than 600 years, older than the designed landscape around it and roughly contemporary with the 1446 castle keep that most visitors climb without noticing it. When the Jeffreyes family laid out the Rock Close in the 1750s they built a folly called the Witch's Kitchen directly beneath the yew, treating a tree already centuries old as ready-made scenery. Legend houses the Blarney Witch here: she is said to have been the first to tell mortals what kissing the Blarney Stone actually does, and to be locked inside the nearby Witch Stone by day, free only after dark. Entry to the gardens is paid, but the one ticket covers the stone, the castle and this tree, and only the tree was alive in the Middle Ages.