The Yew of Nicorps (If commun de Nicorps)
Nicorps, Manche
In October 1987 a hurricane took roughly seven metres off the top of this yew. It has grown most of them back. The record is unusually good, because people keep measuring it. On 11 June 1930 the naturalist Henri Gadeau de Kerville taped the trunk at 6.28 metres and the crown at 18.50 for his survey of Normandy's old trees. When the CAUE de la Manche came back on 10 November 1998, the storm had cost the tree a major limb and the crown stood under 12 metres, while the trunk had thickened to 7.15. Aerial photographs from 1947 onwards show the canopy retreating on the north-east side. The crown is back to around 16 metres now, and the 1998 dossier describes the girth as still increasing, which makes 7.15 a floor rather than a figure. Its age comes from the church's own account, which puts it at 600 years. A photographer once captioned a picture of it "l'if millénaire", and that thousand-year claim circulates with nothing behind it, so the six centuries are the number to work from and the millennium is village talk. Call it somewhere between 500 and 700. This is a churchyard tree in a village of a few hundred people, and that is the honest scale of it. Buried in the same ground: a missionary, a professor of medicine, and Émile Daireaux, who founded a town in Argentina that still carries his name.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Churchyard of the Eglise Saint-Corneille, Nicorps
You can recognise it by size: two yews stand in the churchyard of Saint-Corneille and this is the larger, over seven metres round, with a crown that stops short at about 16 metres where the 1987 storm took its top.
Free. It stands in the churchyard/cemetery of the Eglise Saint-Corneille, a village church with a public cemetery, open in daylight hours; no restriction found in any source.
No specific transit stop found. Nicorps is a small village about 6km south-west of Coutances (which has an SNCF station); reaching the village itself requires a car or bicycle from Coutances.
In fruit
September to November: red arils on female trees, the only part that is not poisonous
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.