The church beside this yew was built in 1855, and the yew may have watched three or four churches come and go before it. That is the suggestion of Baxter's book The Eternal Yew, quoted by the Ancient Yew Group, which calls it possibly the only yew to have sheltered so many. It is one writer's claim, not a record. The ground it rests on is real enough. The present church stands on an early Saxon site in the Blackmore Vale. The tree itself is a great stout yew south of that church, and it barely changes. In 1944 it was measured for Vaughan Cornish's The Churchyard Yew and Immortality at 31 feet 4 inches. In 1998 it was 31 feet at one foot up. In 2012 Peter Norton found 947 centimetres at 30 centimetres, which is 31 feet 1. Seventy years, three tapes and almost no movement, which tells you a great deal about how slowly an old yew lives. The Ancient Yew Group puts yews of this girth in its top class, seven metres and over, an estimate from size rather than a dating. It was photographed again in 2026. Woolland is a hamlet with no practical bus, so plan to drive, and give the tree more time than the church.
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Getting there
Woolland churchyard (church of 1855), Woolland, Dorset
You can recognise it by the sheer bulk of the trunk, over nine metres round near the ground. It stands south of the small 1855 church in Woolland churchyard.
Hamlet in the Blackmore Vale, Dorset, between Blandford Forum and Sturminster Newton; no practical public transport found. Drive.
In fruit
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.