Streatley - Bull Inn

A story is told that ‘In 1440 a nun and a monk were slain for misconduct and buried under the yew tree.’ How far back into history this tree really goes is not known but there is nothing about it that suggests an age approaching 600 years. It might even be less than half of that.
The yew was recorded by the Ancient Tree Inventory in 2025 with a girth of 450cm at 1cm.
Some visitors to the inn in October 1996 returned in April 1997 to measure and photograph the tree and were “horrified to see what had happened to the tree in the meantime. It had been subject to the most ferocious tree surgery – all its lower branches had been removed, up to a height of about 1.5m from the ground, leaving only two bare trunks supporting the remains of the dome-shaped crown………..The tree itself was quite unrecognisable – a skeletal shadow of its former self.” Fortunately the yew can have remarkable powers of recovery and the google earth images almost 30 years after this tree surgery shows a healthy tree.