Fortingall Yew Perthshire
The Fortingall Yew in the churchyard of Fortingall village in Perthshire is the oldest living organism in Europe, a yew tree estimated to be between 3,000 and 9,000 years old whose survival in the quietly beautiful Glen Lyon church garden provides one of the most extraordinary natural heritage encounters available in Scotland. The range of the age estimate reflects the difficulty of dating ancient yews, but even the minimum estimate makes the Fortingall Yew incomparably older than any other living thing of comparable significance in the British Isles.
The yew was already ancient when it was described by visitors in the eighteenth century, when its girth was measured at 52 feet and a funeral was recorded as passing through the interior of its hollowed trunk. The centuries since that measurement have seen the tree change considerably, the great trunk splitting and the various sections developing separately, but the living sections of the ancient tree continue to grow and to carry the genetic material of an organism that was already substantial when the first iron tools appeared in Scotland.
Glen Lyon, the longest enclosed glen in Scotland, provides an extraordinary landscape setting for this pilgrimage to the oldest tree in Europe. The glen's remoteness, its character of deep pastoral beauty and the atmospheric quality of the ancient church and its incredible yew create a combination that ranks among the most distinctive natural and cultural heritage experiences in Scotland.