The tree, thought to be around 500 years old, would have been growing when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in the late 1530s. Now in its eighth year, the Woodland Trust’s Tree of The Year contest highlights the UK’s favourite trees to celebrate the nation's favourite and most beautiful trees, the role they play in fighting climate change and their importance to nature and our history and heritage. Would Yew believe it? Waverley Abbey giant - aged 500 - is crowned Tree of the Year | Daily Mail Online Tree of the Year Ancient Tree Inventory - Woodland Trust
The yew is a fine example of a tree to which great age is often attributed without much in the way of hard evidence. The oldest known yews have invariably lost most of their heartwood to decay and in any event tend to be isolated individuals, usually growing in places that have been regarded as sacred since before the Christian era. Consequently, tree ring-based age estimation is usually impractical or impossible. A few researchers have tried to estimate ages by extrapolation from observed growth rates, a very dubious proposition in view of the fact that when tree ring data are available they usually show extrapolated age estimates to be gross exaggerations. Nonetheless, it seems very likely that many of the largest yews encountered around the Christian shrines of the British Isles were in fact planted during the pre-Christian era by Celtic groups who saw the yew as sacred. It is therefore plausible that yews aged 2000 years or more occur in the British Isles. An age of 4000 years has been attributed, without much basis, to the Tisbury Yew in Wiltshire and the Crowhurst Yew in Surrey, both in England (Hartzell 1991). Taxus baccata (common yew) description (conifers.org)
