The Himley Hall Yews

In 1791 a poet singled out "a very ancient yew of extraordinary size" on the hill beside Himley Hall, standing among old oaks. The hill still has yews among oaks. A survey in 2003 mapped nine of them and noted there may be more. Whether today's largest is the poet's tree, nobody can prove. It measures about 640 centimetres round, 21 feet, and in 1844 a writer recorded a yew here at 20 feet 10 inches. That is close enough to tempt and not enough to settle it. In 1838 the garden writer Loudon described several immense yews at Himley, one celebrated for its widely spreading head. The biggest is largely shell now. More than half its circumference is dead sapwood, and the hollow holds four feet of humus. The others have characters of their own. One female is tall, columnar and red-barked, the branches that once overhung the house since cut. A completely hollow male grows above a badger sett. Their girths step down from 21 feet to 10. Capability Brown extended the park in the 1770s, and it now belongs to Dudley Council. Nobody has put an age on the yews, and we would rather say so than guess. Their records were updated in 2025. The park is free to walk, on the Dudley edge about 8 kilometres south-west of Wolverhampton, with open paths through to Baggeridge Park; the hall charges separately. The yews are on the steep wooded slope above the hall.