Whitnash

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s English Notebooks have various accounts: ‘In front of the tower, on the village-green, is a yew of incalculable age, with a vast circumference of trunk, but a very scanty head of foliage; though its boughs still keep some of the vitality which,perhaps, was in its early prime when the Saxon invaders founded Whitnash. A thousand years is no extraordinary antiquity in the lifetime of a yew. We were pleasantly startled, however, by discovering an exuberance of more youthful life than we had thought possible in so old a tree; for the faces of two children laughed at us out of the opening in the trunk, which had become hollow with long decay.’
On p589 of a notebook dated 1857: ‘In front In front of the church tower is a small, rude and irregular space, in the midst of which grows a very ancient tree, with a huge, hollow trunk, and a still verdant head of foliage growing out of its mutilated decay. I should not wonder if this tree were many centuries old, and a contemporary of the gray, Norman tower before which it flourished and decayed; perhaps even older than that.’