The Golden Bough

In the churchyard of a rural, former mining village in south wales, there are some ancient yew trees. All of which pre-date the late Norman, white washed church by some millennia. Amongst them, however, there are two great, writhing trunks of particular distinction.

 

 

 

I say two trunks, as they are in fact one tree as genetics have revealed. There is also written accounts of the tree being several feet closer together in recent centuries and even one and the same in the more distant past.

 This single tree has also been shown to be at least five thousand years old. At least five millennium.

 

 

At the birth of human metal working this tree was potentially already ancient, at the coming of the Iron age this tree was at least two and a half thousand years old, it stood through the coming and going of whole cultures, whole languages, the raising of Stone Henge, the fall of Celtic Europe.

At the time of Rome, this tree was already three thousand years old; it has stood through Dane and Norman and Saxon invasion. It has seen virtually all human technological development from stone to silicone and continues to thrive as a vast and healthy specimen.  

 

 

These trees were highly revered for the majority of British history for their longevity combined with their toxicity as a potent symbol of the duality of life. I hold them in awe as a vast singular point of contact to our own human history.

 

 

It is quite an amazing thing.

I promise there will be more usual images of metal and fire soon!