St Giles Park Wimborne (2)

1884 – The Quiver – Lord Shaftesbury at home p109: One morning he called my attention to another old yew tree in the middle of the park………a tree he also thought was more than two thousand years old, and I promised to examine and test it……we set off carrying with us a measuring tape and an axe to cut off a portion of one of the branches. we found the girth of the tree was twenty-two feet, consequently the diameter was about seven feet. The diameter of the branch we cut off was only an inch and a quarter, and yet it had thirty season rings, therefore the trunk would in all probability have at least 2,160 such rings, and consequently the tree would be, as Lord Shaftesbury surmised, over two thousand years old.
In 1991 Mary Munslow Jones, editor of the Worcestershire Naturalists Club for many years, wrote to the Conservation Foundation. Part of her letter describes a childhood on the Shaftesbury Estate, where her father was the Clerk of Works. She was often taken to the oldest yew on the estate and described it as ‘hollow, and I used to play house in it. My father said it was over 1000 years old. It was seldom visited, for it lay away from the drives which then led from the mansion to various lodges across the park’. She enclosed a map showing the precise location of the tree. Twenty years after this letter Peter Andrews spoke to Mary Munslow Jones, now in her mid-90s but still with a clear recollection of the tree of her childhood. After visiting the site Peter had to report to her that the tree no longer stands. The land was apparently cleared during the 2nd World War for farming.