The Craigends Yew

On the banks of the River Gryffe in Renfrewshire stands what looks like a small grove of yews and is in fact one tree. A male yew somewhere between five and seven centuries old has spent much of that time doing what yews do when nobody stops them: its branches arch down, touch the ground, take root, and send up new stems of their own. A path has been cut through the result, so a visitor walks inside what reads as a thicket but shares one root system throughout. Its trunk measures 8.68 metres round, recorded in 2016, and the canopy has grown from 74 metres in circumference when a Victorian naturalist measured it in 1890 to roughly 100 metres today, a century of continuous spread that is itself a kind of proof the tree has stayed one thing. Fire and vandalism have scarred it in the past; conservation work in 2018 cleared the grove and the tree answered with new leader growth. One local source stretches the age toward 800 or 900 years and a Knights Templar connection, worth reading as folklore rather than measurement, since girth-per-year is a rough rule even on an ordinary trunk, let alone one that spreads by layering. It stands on former Craigends Estate ground beside a modern housing estate, free to reach on foot with no gate and no ticket, and was shortlisted for Scotland's Tree of the Year in 2016.