1000jährige Eibe Gutau

The name promises a thousand years. The trunk disagrees. Walkers on the Boblberg circuit above Gutau pass this yew and call it the thousand-year yew. Upper Austria's register is quieter. It was protected as Naturdenkmal nd292 on 6 February 1985, entered simply as a European yew standing about twenty metres east of the Staudinger farmhouse at Lehen, with no age field at all. What the record does carry is a waistline. In February 1985 the trunk measured 1.70 metres round and the tree stood roughly eleven metres tall. Measured again in 2016, it had reached 1.90 metres. Twenty centimetres in thirty-one years. Even at that unhurried pace, a trunk still under two metres round is a long way short of what a millennium of growth usually leaves behind. Yews are genuinely hard to date, because the old ones hollow out and take their rings with them. But the name here is folklore rather than measurement. So this one goes without an age. Nobody has dated it and the register never tried. If you know of a survey that holds up, tell us and it goes on the page. What is not in doubt: a dark, dense evergreen at the edge of a working farm, on a marked walking loop, and older than anyone there can put a number on.