Craigends is a stretch of riverside ground beside the River Gryffe in Renfrewshire, on the edge of a housing estate outside Houston, close to Glasgow but too far for an easy bus ride. What makes the walk worth it is one yew, listed on the Ancient Tree Inventory, that has spent five or six centuries spreading sideways rather than up. Its branches arch down, root where they touch, and grow into new trunks, so what a visitor finds today reads as a small wood and is, underneath, a single tree.
0 / 1 visités à Craigends
1
The Craigends Yew
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · roughly 600 years · Craigends, Houston
On the banks of the River Gryffe in Renfrewshire stands what looks like a small grove of yews and is in fact one tree. A male yew somewhere between five and seven centuries old has spent much of that time doing what yews do when nobody stops them: its branches arch down, touch the ground, take root, and send up new stems of their own. A path has been cut through the result, so a visitor walks inside what reads as a thicket but shares one root system throughout.
Its trunk measures 8.68 metres round, recorded in 2016, and the canopy has grown from 74 metres in circumference when a Victorian naturalist measured it in 1890 to roughly 100 metres today, a century of continuous spread that is itself a kind of proof the tree has stayed one thing. Fire and vandalism have scarred it in the past; conservation work in 2018 cleared the grove and the tree answered with new leader growth. One local source stretches the age toward 800 or 900 years and a Knights Templar connection, worth reading as folklore rather than measurement, since girth-per-year is a rough rule even on an ordinary trunk, let alone one that spreads by layering. It stands on former Craigends Estate ground beside a modern housing estate, free to reach on foot with no gate and no ticket, and was shortlisted for Scotland's Tree of the Year in 2016.
Lire la suite et l’accès →