Hollow Places. Christopher Hadley

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      Strikingly, a track is marked on the tithe map crossing the intersection of Pepsels, Nether Rackets, Pipsels Mead and Ten Acres fields. This track might have passed straight through the stile in the yew tree. The track – a tunnel of dashed lines on the map – goes no further, as if it led to something no longer there. The countryside is marked with these strange paths to nowhere, or rather paths to the past.

      The good Reverend Wigram had not made up the names of Great and Little Pepsells after all, so perhaps no one had invented the tree either. The boundary between them was a real place and you could visit it still. There may even be something in the rest of the tale, if once again we allow the logic of that rustic who would not have believed a word of Shonks’ tale if he hadn’t seen the place in the wall with his own eyes. There was certainly a field, so we might as well believe that there was a tree, but what was an ancient yew of all trees doing growing there astride a track in the middle of nowhere?

      A single yew alone outside a churchyard is a great rarity – with or without a dragon’s lair. Of the 311 ancient yews known in Britain, very few are not – and have never been – associated with a known church or religious site, and an ancient yew growing anywhere at all is an unfamiliar sight in the countryside around the Pelhams: there are none in Cambridgeshire, Essex or Bedfordshire, and just two surviving ancient yews known in Hertfordshire – both in churchyards. There are a further seven veteran yews in the county – that is trees between 500 and 1,200 years old according to the latest classification by the Ancient Yew Group – but they are all linked to a church.

      The nearest non-churchyard yew is a lone veteran growing in Hatfield Forest some sixteen miles away. Although Oliver Rackham insisted that it was only 230 years old, ‘and should be remembered by anyone who supposes that big yews must always be of fabulous age’. Recent analysis by an arborist suggests that the tree is much older and has a smaller circumference than you’d expect because it has spent much of its life in the shade. Perched on the edge of the decoy lake, sloughing off the bark of its many-corded bole, it conceals the mysterious cavities of ancient yew. Its existence gives us some confidence that our yew is within the geographical distribution of these curious trees.

      Nearer to the Pelhams, a remarkable specimen lingers in the churchyard of St James the Great, in Thorley, near Bishop’s Stortford. Ringed by precarious gravestones, the main trunk appears to be made from many closely packed smaller trunks, like the product of black fairy magic, an impenetrable palisade of thick stakes imprisoning some secret. A terrible secret: the tree has been hollowed out by arson, its innards gone, and what remains is dreadfully tormented and charcoaled. Yet still it lives and grows and puts out new leaves. Yews are extraordinary trees. In the church is a certificate, from when the Conservation Foundation ran its Yew Tree Campaign in the 1980s, attesting that the tree is 1,000 years old. Ancient yews are now defined as those over 800 years old, with no upper age limit, but determining the age of yews is about as controversial as botany gets. Tim Hills of the Ancient Yew Group writes that the science has moved on a lot since those certificates were awarded based on the ideas of Allen Meredith in his influential The Sacred Yew. Regardless of its age, the yew at Thorley is rightly something to be revered.

      Robert Blair in his eighteenth-century poem ‘The Grave’ calls the yew a cheerless, unsocial plant that loves to spend its time in the midst of skulls and coffins. Illustrating the poem, William Blake depicted the tree’s only merriment as ghosts and shades performing their mystic dance around the trunk under a wan moon, but in his watercolour the tree is at the centre, it is evergreen and blue, not СКАЧАТЬ