Dean's Tree

Local tradition puts this yew at over seven hundred years old. A more cautious estimate, based on girth alone, still lands at over five hundred. Either figure makes it older than the house whose garden it now shares, built in 1710, and very likely the oldest living thing in County Dublin. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, is said to have sat beneath it while writing and while courting Esther Vanhomrigh, the Vanessa of his poems, who lived nearby in Celbridge. Nobody can confirm the story, and old trees near famous writers tend to collect this kind of legend whether or not it happened, so take the Swift connection as folklore worth repeating rather than a documented fact. What is certain is the tree itself: a girth of five metres, split with age, still green, standing in a corner of a garden ringed with benches for visitors to sit exactly where Swift supposedly did. The Old Glebe is a private home and only opens to the public on set dates each year, under Ireland's Section 482 scheme for historic houses: all of May, all of June, and nine days in mid-August, 10am to 2pm. Check the dates before making the trip.