Whitnash

September 2005 – Tim Hills: The following is part of Nathaniel Hawthorn’s description: ‘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’.