The Bad Goisern Parish Church Yew

You pass under this one on your way into the church. The yew stands on the street at the entrance to the Bad Goisern parish church, on the public side of the threshold rather than in among the graves, which is where yews in this part of Europe usually end up. Upper Austria protected it on 4 August 2006 and, unusually for this register, was willing to put an age on it: roughly 200 years, estimated rather than counted, and worth keeping exactly as loose as the state left it. Nobody has cored this tree. The two figures that are measurements rather than guesses are a trunk 2.25 metres round in 2006 and a height of about 15 metres, which for a yew is tall; they are slow, dense, low things by habit, and this one has gone up. Two centuries, give or take, puts its early years in a valley that ran on salt and timber. It was full grown by the time the Salzkammergut railway came through and turned Goisern from a working village into somewhere people get off the train, and it has stood at that doorway through every wedding and funeral since. One thing to keep straight: Bad Goisern holds a second protected yew, three kilometres away in the hamlet of Untersee, standing alone in a meadow. This is not that tree.