106 ESS A YS. 



" Darley Yew " in Derbyshire, having a mean diameter of 

 nine feet five inches, would, by this rule, be 1356 years old. 

 The Yew in Tisbury churchyard, Dorsetshire, the trunk of 

 which measures thirty-seven feet in circumference, would now 

 be almost 1600 years old. The same computation, applied 

 to the " superannuated Yew-tree of Braburne churchyard, 

 Kent," which, by the measurements of Evelyn himself and 

 of Sir George Carteret, was fifty-eight feet eleven inches in 

 circumference in the year 1660, would give it the respectable 

 age of 2540 years at that time ! This tree has long ago dis- 

 appeared. But it did not greatly exceed in size the Yew 

 still extant in Fortingal churchyard, in Perthshire, Scotland, 

 situated in a wild district among the Grampian Mountains, 

 which forms a good collateral witness to the credibility of 

 Evelyn's account. The trunk of the " Fortingal Yew " was 

 fifty-two feet in circumference, when measured by the Hon. 

 Daines Barrington in 1769 ; l or fifty-six feet six inches, ac- 

 cording to Pennant's somewhat later measurement ; 2 the dis- 

 crepancy being, no doubt, attributed to the fact that the two 

 measurements were taken at different heights. In Barring- 

 ton's time, the surface was nearly entire at the base, although 

 upon one side all the interior had decayed. Afterwards, the 

 cavity reached the opposite surface ; and the trunk at length 

 separated into two distinct semicircular portions, dead and 

 decaying within, but alive and growing at the circumference, 

 between which the rustic funeral processions were long accus- 

 tomed to pass on their way to the grave. In this condition 

 it is figured by Strutt, as the first illustration of his " Sylva 

 Scotica " ; but he has omitted to inform us when the sketch 

 was taken. We suspect that it represents the tree as it ap- 

 peared more than fifty years ago ; for, if we rightly appre- 

 hend the account given by the excellent Dr. Neill of Edin- 

 burgh, who visited the place in the summer of 1833, one of 

 these half-trunks has now disappeared, with the exception of 

 some decayed portions that scarcely rise above the soil ; but 

 the other, which still shoots forth branches from the summit, 



1 " Phil. Trans.," lix. p. 37. 



a " Tours in Scotland," in Pinkerton's Gen. Coll., vol. iii. 



