What is the oldest tree in Runnymede?
The oldest tree at Runnymede is the Ankerwycke Yew, growing in the grounds of the ruined St Mary's Priory at Ankerwycke, across the Thames from Runnymede meadow. The Woodland Trust puts its age at approximately 2,000 years; the National Trust says as much as 2,500. It is free to visit, on open National Trust parkland reached on foot from Magna Carta Lane, no ticket required.
Two national bodies that both know their trees cannot agree on this one's age to within five hundred years, and neither can settle it, because an old yew rots from the middle outwards and takes its rings with it. What can be measured is the trunk: 7.98 metres round, taken low, at thirty centimetres off the ground, because a base this hollowed and buttressed offers no clean line higher up. Either age figure leaves it standing here in June 1215, when King John sealed Magna Carta somewhere on this stretch of the Thames; tradition puts the sealing under this tree, and some historians argue the ceremony happened on this bank rather than in the meadow opposite, though that remains an argument rather than a record. The same caution applies to the story that Henry VIII courted Anne Boleyn beneath it in the 1530s. A 2020 survey recorded holes, water pockets, decaying wood in the crown and a trunk hollow enough to step into, all of it ordinary for a yew of this age and no sign the tree is anything but alive and standing. Visitors still tie strips of cloth to nearby boards, an old habit for an old tree.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.