The Pernstejn Yew

Local belief holds that Pernstejn Castle prospers for as long as this yew does. In April 2005 one of its branches broke; on 15 April the castle caught fire. Sources record the coincidence and nobody claims a link, which is about the right amount of weight to give it. The tree is the oldest yew in Moravia and nobody can tell you how old that is. Popular coverage settles on roughly 1,000 years. The Czech Wikipedia entry collects the estimates that actually exist, and they run from 400 years to 2,000, with the folklore figures clustering between 760 and 1,050. Take the round thousand as the number people repeat rather than the number anyone has established. What has been measured is the trunk: about 410 centimetres round in 1900, about 450 today, standing 15 to 16.5 metres. The founding story is that a pilgrim pushed his yew walking staff into the ground here and it rooted. The country voted it Czech Tree of the Year in 2005. A survey in 2001 put its vitality at three out of five, ageing but alive. It stands on the north slope of the castle forest park, beside the walking path up from Nedvedice, and can be reached on foot without a castle ticket, though one description places it more loosely on the castle grounds.