Ledgemore Bottom - Horsley

The following information is taken from the 1884 History of Horsley by Rev. Messing Rudkin. ‘There is a tradition that a church once stood there, but without any support from record or excavation. I apprehend certain yew trees adjacent furnished the denomination’. This account by Dudley Fosbrook, who was Curate-in-charge of Horsley at the close of the last century bears witness at any rate to the great age of the yew trees which still exist, for they must have appeared even a century ago of very ancient date to have been considered the origin of a tradition that a church once stood there. A Clergyman who visited some ancient yew trees on an island in Loch Lomond this last summer, and which were being examined at the time by some learned society who declared many of the trees to be 1500 years old, gives it as his opinion that the yews in the Churchyard Field are of the same age. The largest of these yews at six feet from the base measures twenty-three feet. If a church or churchyard formerly existed there, it must have been in Saxon or British times.