What is the oldest tree in Fortingall?
The oldest tree in Fortingall is the yew in the churchyard, and it is old enough that serious sources disagree by three thousand years. Forestry and Land Scotland puts it at 5,000; Bevan-Jones, the standard reference on ancient yews, gives 2,000 to 3,000 and notes it could date from a post-Roman Christian site here, which would make it about 1,500. Nobody can close that gap. Yews hollow as they age, and this one's heartwood was already rotting in the 1770s, so there are no rings left to count and never will be. What the record does hold is size. Daines Barrington measured a single continuous trunk at 52 feet round in 1769, roughly 15.8 metres, and Thomas Pennant made it more shortly after. That trunk has since split, and what a visitor sees now is a ring of separate stems that are all one tree. It is still growing and still changing. In 2015 the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh reported that a branch on this male yew had begun bearing berries, a partial change of sex that made news well beyond Perthshire. Nothing else in the village comes close in age, and nothing needs to: people drive up the glen for this one tree.
The churchyard sits in the middle of the village, open in daylight, with no ticket and nobody to ask. The yew is behind a low stone wall put up in 1785 after visitors took to cutting pieces off it, and the gate in that wall stays locked, so you cannot touch the tree. You can stand a couple of metres away on the churchyard path and see the whole of it, which is what people come for. Reaching Fortingall takes a car. It is about eight miles west of Aberfeldy, twenty to twenty-five minutes on narrow roads at the mouth of Glen Lyon, and no regular bus serves the village. There is parking by the church. Bring waterproofs: this is highland Perthshire and the glen makes its own weather. The church itself, Fortingall Kirk, is usually open, and the churchyard also holds a set of early Christian carved stones worth a minute of anyone's time. Do not expect an interpretation centre or a shop: the village is a row of thatched cottages, a hotel and the kirk, and that is all of it.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.