The Iffley Yew

St Mary the Virgin in Iffley is one of the most complete unaltered Norman churches left in England, built around 1170 by the local lord of the manor and his wife. Against its southeast wall grows a yew so large that its canopy shades several gravestones beneath it, its trunk hollow, rust-red and furrowed with age, still producing dense evergreen foliage and berries every year. An 1892 account in Chambers Journal put its age at over 1,600 years, which would mean druids could plausibly have gathered beneath it a thousand years before the church's Norman builders laid a single stone, since pre-Christian communities across Britain regarded yew groves as sacred sites long before churches were built on top of them. Later, more cautious assessments back away from that figure and describe the tree only as a strong candidate for being contemporary with the Norman church itself, still a respectable 850 years or so. Either estimate makes it one of the oldest living things in Oxfordshire. Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, spent most of his life as an Oxford academic and is thought to have visited Iffley's church often; local tradition credits this yew as the inspiration for one of his early illustrations of the tree in Alice's Adventures Underground, the manuscript that became Alice in Wonderland.