Bournheath

The yew has a massive canopy and four separate large boles in a crescent, suggesting that it was once a circular stool of about 6 metres in circumference. The tree is male, although one small upper branch is female. Three of the four boles are either physically joined or touching to a height of about two feet, the fourth abuts another at ground level.  I think most people looking at it would assume it is a single tree, the boles joined at ground level.  From recollection, the female branch is no more than a single sprig – an area of about a square metre of foliage on an otherwise male branch of an all-male set of boles. In a book featuring the house, Robin Shaw, an A.E.Houseman enthusiast says “In Housman times” (b. 1859) “there was a large Yew on the opposite side of the road which reached right across the road nearly touching the windows”.  I don’t know what his source for that account was.  There is no sign of another Yew across the road here now.  The Yew here today does almost touch the windows, but is not on the opposite side of the road, so unless the  account  referred to was from an old memory and wrong about the side of the road the tree stood upon, our present Yew was one of at least a pair of very large ones on the site.