This originally appeared in The Sunday Times
Defynnog is a low-slung village set beneath the treeless, undulating scrub of the Brecon Beacons. A dozen or so houses, wedged between two A-roads, a disused school and a whitewashed, 17th-century church, St Cynog’s. Moses Williams, who translated the Bible into Welsh and thus helped to savethe language from the fate of Cornish, was vicar here. He preached under the vertiginous belltower.
In summer, the churchyard is bright with orange hawkweed, dandelions and plastic mourning flowers strewn among the listing stones. Nearby, casting a sullen shadow, stands a magnificent yew. The same kind of tree probably grows in your nearest cemetery. Nobody knows why yew trees were planted by churches: whatever your history teacher said, it has nothing to do with medieval longbow production. Many of these yews predate their churches in any case. This one is older than Christianity itself.
Last week, a group of experts identified the Defynnog yew as the oldest tree in Britain, perhaps in Europe. The best estimates say it is about 5,000 years old, which means that it sprouted around the same time that people began constructing Stonehenge. The Egyptians were mummifying their dead by 3,000BC but would not start building the pyramids for hundreds of years.
Dating yews is difficult. They are not like the vast and silent redwoods of California, whose trunks add neat, numerical rings every year. Yews morph and shapeshift across the centuries. The oldest parts die and rot, and the plant then feeds on them, renewing itself from its own death. That’s another reason it grows in churchyards — as a symbol of resurrection. Storms and lightning, or the few parasites unaffected by its poisonous leaves, can split or seek to strangle a yew tree, but it will push out new roots and saplings. A fallen branch can embed itself in the soil and become a new tree.
Paul Wilding has been the vicar at St Cynog’s for 26 years. He is a gentle man, wet-eyed and softly spoken, wearing sober socks and a fraying dog collar. “We’ve always known the tree was old,” he whistles. “Some of the oldest people in the village still remember playing hide-and-seek in it as children.”
Defynnog gets few visitors, but this story has been popular. Wilding seems unsettled by the Australian accents and the sensible American travelling shoes suddenly clambering over his tree.
On the ground, it looks like two yews, standing about 10ft apart. DNA testing recently confirmed they are the same organism. Between them, sheltered from the rain, chiselled stone slabs commemorate pious Victorians. The larger trunk has split into three or four parts. Over the centuries, these have put out new shoots that have fused, knotted and furled on the ancient wood, a “growth of intertwisted fibres serpentine”.
On the easternmost side, half-hidden by the poisonous leaves, grows a branch in yellowy white. A golden bough, a genetic anomaly; shocking and luminescent under the dark green canopy. Red-brown needles pattern the grassless earth. The tree’s roots have shoved a flimsy, rusted sheet of corrugated iron, which once lined a grave, up to the surface.
“Put your hands here,” whispers a slender, spectacled Canadian. He tells me he is an artist who specialises in drawing yews, and his wife says the tree is “the mother lode” for him. He shows me a gnarled, cobwebbed cavity in the trunk. “You can feel his energy, can’t you? That buzzing?” I touch the oddly cold wood, close my eyes and concentrate, but the main thing I feel is a squirming English embarrassment.
Some people say this tree was planted for a Celtic druid, a Silurian, one of the pugilistic tribe defeated by the Romans in the 1st century AD. We know almost nothing about what druids and their illiterate flock believed. What little evidence there is suggests they expected to be reincarnated, and practised human sacrifice by burning people alive in Edward Woodward effigies.
In the 1960s, someone dug up a tall, carved stone near this tree, covered with inscriptions in Celtic, Latin and Ogham, a predominantly Irish script used between the 5th and 10th centuries. The stone commemorated a man named Rugniatis, and the tree was already 3,000 years old when this forgotten Roman lived. Much later came St Cynog himself, a 5th-century Welsh prince martyred by marauding bands in the Brecon Beacons.
Now Cynog’s religion is dying too. Wales is losing its faith faster than anywhere in England — a 14% fall in the last census. The yew has seen many faiths flourish and die, and it may still be standing after the last Welsh Christian is under the sod.
When the tourists, Wilding and the church’s PR have dispersed, I return alone to the Defynnog yew. I clamber up the roots, and sit for a few minutes under the silent canopy. It hangs as heavy as history. Priests of different stripes, peasants, travellers, a thousand villagers, have all sat in the same spot, sheltered by the same life. Underneath, unseen, it wraps its roots around their bones.