Here’s looking at Yew
(The Fortingall Yew: Fortingall, Scotland)
On our car trip in Scotland, I navigated while Ying drove – it’s a good partnership and my mapreading skills are not too bad when compared to many of my peers. It seems that girls especially shirk responsibility for mapreading and navigation if a boy is driving, but I fear this has more to do with the driver generally blaming the avigator when things go wrong. Anyway, I was constantly combing the map for points of interest that we might consider passing on the way; the Falls of Dochart being one; a series of waterfalls and white water passing right through a village, we stopped momentarily at Castle Menzies too for a look around, but this is another of our many brief stops – the Fortingall Yew – the oldest tree in Europe.
Somehow I had anticipated something larger and more epic in proportion, but unfortunately the poor old Yew has degraded over many centuries to a sparse collection of scattered branches and a carved out trunk – still living, mind you. There were road signs for the Yew and the churchyard where it resides was bristling with arrows and signposts, even though it was very evident that the grand old Yew was boxed into a little prison cell of protective stone walls. You can see the overloaded branches being propped up with stone in the right hand image. As we looked on, and read the tree’s accompanying information, it became clear that the girth of the tree was once massive; sixteen metres or so. It’s a bit of a sorry affair now, but a few hundered years ago, when it was just 2000 years old, it muct have been an awesome tree.
Once we had stopped, we realised we had hardly made any ground because of all our silly stops. We even stopped on a dam in the pouring rain just to have a look around. After seeing the Yew, it was suddenly lunchtime, having little choice we ventured into the Fortingall Hotel and had an amazing lunch – I fully recommend the staff and the food, it was brilliant. Quite a relief since we literally had no choice – Fortingall seems to be situated in an area completely bereft of any lunch spots at all, any shops, pubs or cafes. It was a relief to discover we had made the right choice!
Last night I neglected this post as I was attending the Degree Show opening. It was a long night of chatter and viewing work. Every year the quality of the exhibitions goes up – compared to my graduating year, the effort put into making everything more and more professional is noteworthy. In the end though, everybody leaves in a beery haze, whatever the exhibition – perhaps fewer people would be interested in going if it wasn’t for the free bars.
– Today Rosie is catching up with friends, buying sheets of acrylic, going to the printers and probably ending up at the Art School Street Party at some point in Glasgow, Scotland –
