Kingston St Mary Yew

This yew broke into four pieces long ago and carried on as four trees. When Tim Hills recorded it in 2001, the ancient trunk had been split by its own hollow into separate fragments, standing apart in a ring and filled with ivy. Measured round the outside of that ring at ground level, the tree came to 10.03 metres, a figure Wondermondo repeats. That number describes the whole circle, not a single stem, so treat it as the footprint of the old tree rather than the width of any one trunk. Yews this size fall in the Ancient Yew Group's top class, seven metres and up, which puts it in the band they call ancient. There is no dating behind it, and nobody has found an early written reference to this yew at all. For a tree of this size in a church that dates from about 1225, that silence is its own small mystery. What survives is a ring of trunks south-west of the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in a village just north of Taunton. Photographs were updated in 2016. If you know anything older about it, a mention in a parish history or a sketch, tell us. Somebody in eight centuries of this churchyard must have noticed it.