The Marlay Park Yew

This yew was already between 300 and 500 years old when Aubrey Fennell measured it for the Tree Council of Ireland in 2009, which puts its first growth somewhere between the early 1500s and the early 1700s. Nobody has dated it more tightly than that. It is not one trunk but several. The heritage register records it as a multi-stemmed tree, and its 5.78 metres of girth was taken low, 40 centimetres off the ground, around the whole cluster. The Ancient Yew Group's database lists it in its Ancient class, but on the strength of that same survey, so the two records are one measurement rather than two opinions. The yew database files it as an estate tree. Since 1975, when Marlay Park opened to the public, it has been one anyone off the 16 bus can walk up to, in a regional park now run by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. Two plain caveats. No dated sighting of it has been published since the 2009 survey, so how it has fared since is unrecorded. And the pin comes from the register's grid reference, which can sit about 40 metres out in a park of 300 acres, so search the ground around the marker for a cluster of dark evergreen stems rather than expecting to find it under the pin. If you do find it, a photograph taken at the tree would settle both questions.