The Corstorphine SycamoreYoung replacement

The tree standing in Corstorphine Kirk's churchyard today is not the tree its story is about. The original Corstorphine sycamore, reputedly planted around 1600, grew a distinctive golden foliage found nowhere else and became famous locally after 1679, when Christian Nimmo murdered her lover James, Lord Forrester, beneath its branches with his own sword. Her ghost, known as the White Lady of Corstorphine, is said to haunt the spot still. The original tree does not, since it was badly damaged in a storm in 1998 and died in 2005, ending a run of roughly four centuries. Because the variety cannot grow from seed, only from cuttings, the tree in the churchyard now is a direct clone of the original, propagated after its death and planted to keep the golden leaved variety alive at the place that gave it its name. It carries the same genetics and, given time, the same striking spring colour, but it is a young tree standing in for a very old one, honestly labelled here as such rather than passed off as the historic original. The churchyard is open and free. What you are visiting is a memory of a murder and a continuity of genetics rather than four centuries of standing wood.