In almost any old English churchyard you can find a yew tree, one that is often older than the church itself. It’s such a familiar sight that most walk past without even wondering why it’s there. But the yew’s presence in burial grounds is not at all accidental. What you’re looking at is the echo of hundreds–perhaps thousands–of years of belief and superstition.
Yews (Taxus baccata) live extraordinarily long lives, and many of the oldest specimens in Britain are older than the church they guard. For example, the yew at St Mary and St Gabriel’s Church in Stoke Gabriel, Devon was already centuries old when the church’s presence was recorded in the Domesday survey of 1086. How old is the tree? It’s estimated to be between 1,200 and 1,400 years old, making it one of the most ancient trees in the country. And, local legend holds that if you walk around it backwards seven times without stumbling, you’ll be granted a wish.
Walk ye backward round about me
Seven times round for all to see
Stumble not and then for certain
One true wish will come to thee
Stoke Gabriel isn’t unusual. In England and Wales, a large number of the yews are as old, or older than, the churches they stand beside. This suggests the tree itself was already a mark denoting sacred ground, that the church was built to stand beside it rather than the other way around.
The most popular explanation for the yew-and-graveyard pairing can be traced to the Druids who regarded the yew as sacred, planting it near their temples and sacred groves. When the churches were built on already sacred ground, the trees were left standing, perhaps to help ease the transition from the old religion to the new.
One popular folkloric explanation for the existence of yew trees in graveyards is that the yew roots grew into the decomposing bodies buried around them, drawing nourishment. Some tales even claim that the roots grow through the eye sockets of corpses to pin down the dead and stop their souls from wandering. Yew trees also gained a reputation as a gathering place for witches, linking yew branches witchcraft, magic and the dead.
And this connection to witchcraft takes us back to the Stoke Gabriel legend–walk backward around the yew seven times without stumbling, and earn a wish–ties the tree to the belief that moving against the expected direction around a sacred object opens a door to something beyond the ordinary world.
To walk widdershins is to move counter-clockwise, against the direction of the sun. Widdershins walking turns up again and again in British folklore as a movement that unsettles the natural order: witches’ rites, calling of spirits, turning a blessing into a curse.
And on All Hallow’s Eve as the veil between worlds thins, Lady Diana Star of A Ghost in Amber (Book Five of the Elemental Web Tales) walks widdershins around an old churchyard yew and steps backwards through time. Fiction, yes, but built on the belief that yews are ancient, graveyards are thin places, and that walking the wrong way around something sacred is asking, dangerously, for something more than the ordinary world offers.
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Anne Renwick holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry, cellular and molecular biology, and every book in the Elemental Web Chronicles is built around real science — from nerve regeneration to bioluminescence — reimagined through a Victorian steampunk lens.
Want more of the science behind the books? Visit Behind the Books for deep dives into the real research behind each story.
