Robert Louis Stevenson's Yew

The remains of Robert Louis Stevenson's childhood swing still hang from a limb of this yew, according to the City of Edinburgh Council. Stevenson spent much of his boyhood at Colinton Manse, played in the tree, and later put it into A Child's Garden of Verses, the book of poems about being small that he wrote as a grown man, in the same years he was writing Treasure Island and Kidnapped. The council puts the yew at 300 to 400 years old and names it among Scotland's top 100 heritage trees. Yews keep their age to themselves, so take that as an estimate rather than a birth date. Either end of it means the tree was already old when the boy found it. The two measurements on record do not quite agree. The Ancient Yew Group has it at 351 centimetres round, while the council's figure, a trunk 116 centimetres across, works out a little larger, and neither says at what height the tape went on. The tree stands in the manse garden, which is private. The council's own advice is to look at it from the churchyard of Colinton Parish Church next door, which is open, and the view over the wall is the one to come for. Colinton village is a short bus ride from the centre. The records and photographs we found are some years old. If you have stood here recently, tell us how it looks.