The Millennial Yew of Estry

The cavity inside this yew is about 3.1 metres across, and local accounts have thirty people standing in it at once. That hollow is also why nobody can date the tree: there are no rings left to count. Estimates run from 1,000 years to 1,800, and the Pays de Vire tourist board settles on somewhere between 1,000 and 1,600, which is about as close as anyone honestly gets. It is repeatedly called the oldest tree in Normandy, and by some accounts in France. What can be measured has been, three times over a century, and the figure keeps moving. The trunk was 10 metres round in 1894, 11.4 metres in 1990 and 11.55 metres when someone put a tape around it again in July 2009. A tree still adding girth at that age is a tree still working. Two of its great limbs reach roughly 15 metres out from the trunk and are carried on cables. Its roots are said to run more than 30 metres, under graves on the far side of the cemetery, though that one is village lore rather than survey. It stands in the churchyard at Estry, a village now folded into the commune of Valdalliere, free and open at any hour. The ARBRES association labelled it a Remarkable Tree in September 2009.