Nether Alderley Yew

An account from 1850 found an ancient stone font standing under the old yew at St Mary's, Nether Alderley, out in the churchyard. The church's own history says the font once lay buried by the tree. The parish calls it the 1,200-year-old yew, and the church archivist told Macclesfield Live it dates back 1,200 years. Neither says what the number rests on. The Ancient Yew Group gives it no age, only a size class of five to seven metres round, which by the Group's own reckoning usually means a tree above 500 years. The girth is an old figure, 18 feet or about 5.5 metres, from Allen Meredith's gazetteer of 1994. Tim Hills of the Group did not measure it when he visited in 1999, but he described a male tree whose trunk holds its girth a long way up, great rolls of wood flowing round the stumps of sawn-off branches, and a hole about two and a half feet up through which a stem shows growing inside. In 1938 Notes and Queries called it a veteran with great spreading branches. Two younger yews keep it company. One is tall and straight and may have layered from the old tree; the other has fallen and twisted. The church also points to a Saxon preaching cross in its grounds. St Mary's is on Church Lane, opposite Nether Alderley Mill. Our latest dated record of the yew is that 1999 visit, so tell us how it looks.