Hollow Places. Christopher Hadley
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this was not the only yew that disappeared from the landscape in the early nineteenth century.
In 1848 one archaeological journal lamented that yews were ‘so reduced in number as to seem like the last of a once flourishing and noble race, mourning in their own decay over the magnificence of the past, and the desolation of the present’. In 1539, John Leland had counted thirty-nine yews at Strata Florida in Wales; they are the only ones he mentions in his famous itinerary around the British Isles. Three hundred years later, only three of the famous yews were still standing. There is an engraving and article from Gardener’s Chronicle in May 1874 with a description of the largest tree that is not unlike that of the Pelham yew in Wigram’s letter: it ‘was divided into two parts, leaving a passage through it, this was 22 ft in girth’. Beneath one of the three survivors was the traditional resting place of the fourteenth-century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. It too disappeared after 1874, possibly during an archaeological dig of the Cistercian abbey at the end of the nineteenth century.
It is loathsome to think that our tree was felled indifferently, because it was in the way, or to give unemployed labourers something to do to earn their gallon loaf, but whatever their reason, it had to come down. On their return from breakfast, the sight that greeted them must have been something of a surprise. Was their approach a cautious one? Where they had wrestled with the tree half an hour before, there was now a large hole, a cavern even, and the tree had fallen into it. ‘When they came back, that yew Tree had fallen down of itself; and when they looked, there was a girt hole right underneath it, underneath its roots, a girt cave like.’ This in the words of the rustic voice Wigram used in his final account to W. B. Gerish. His 1888 letter to the Hertfordshire Observer is less picturesque but more dramatic: ‘On his return [he] found that the old tree had fallen, collapsing into a large cavity underneath its roots.’
Until I read about grub felling, I simply could not understand how a half-felled tree had fallen into a hole, but if most of the roots had been severed and there was a cavity under the yew, it would have been suspended by a few stubborn roots that eventually surrendered their charge to the hollow in the earth. After visiting several ancient yews, I could believe that one might collapse in on itself. The weight distribution is uneven as the heart rots away leaving heavy outer trunks and branches, twisted and over-balanced as the branches trail along the ground. The roots, severed and weakened as they would have been by the men’s exertions, must have given way while they were at breakfast. At least that’s the explanation needed to understand the 1888 version in which the tree falls into a large hole. The later version could be interpreted differently: the tree simply fell over and left a large cavity where the roots had been, but surely these countrymen were used to the holes left by trees that came down in this way, and would not need a supernatural explanation for the cavity.
‘It’s not unknown for voids to develop under very old trees,’ wrote Wigram. It is certainly true that a cavern, or at least a hole, could have formed in the chalk under the shallow clay where the tree grew – it is not unusual for sink holes to form from erosion where the bedrock is limestone – and the weight of a tree no longer held steady by its roots could have brought in the ceiling of the cavity. It is not the only Pelham story of a cavity opening up in the chalk. Less than a mile to the east, on the other side of the Ash Valley, there is a tale recorded in the 1930s that the first church in the Pelhams was destroyed by Vikings or Pharisees (the local word for fairies) or, more prosaically, it collapsed into a hole that opened up beneath it.
She was down. ‘It is done,’ wrote Rider Haggard of another tree in another place.
A change has come over the landscape; the space that for generations has been filled with leafy branches is now white and empty air. I know of no more melancholy sight – indeed, to this day I detest seeing a tree felled; it always reminds me of the sudden and violent death of a man. I fancy it must be the age of timbers that inspires us with this respect and sympathy, which we do not feel for a sapling or a flower.
Ancient trees have personalities and attract stories; it is hard not to think that this was an event in the life of the village. A crowd must have gathered that morning, if not to watch the iniquitous act, then to see the cavity. We know the Skinner family kept loppings, which hints at the value of the highly prized wood. No doubt, other villagers kept pieces as well if they could – to make spoons and knife handles. Peter Kalm, an eighteenth-century Scandinavian traveller, left an account of a tree he saw chopped down in Hertfordshire, describing the surprising number of people on the scene, wanting the leaves and roots and twigs for fuel or to make baskets. I imagine a host of villagers turning up that day. Nothing of that prized wood would be wasted. John Aubrey’s fair and spreading ewe-tree furnished him and the other schoolboys with nutt-crackers and scoopes to pull the flesh out of their apples. These would make fine souvenirs from a dragon’s lair.
I have often wondered what was made of the yew. If anything has survived. I have started to keep an eye on the local antique auctions, hoping to find a Windsor chair from the right period. I know what I am looking for. The wood mustn’t be too dark. The seat needs to be elm and shaped like the flagstones of a castle staircase, as if worn by years of use. And it has to be a stick back, no splat, with two hoops of yew, one for the back and one for the elbows, burnished to a rich honey, the tight grain bewitching and warm, taken from a tree with a dragon in its story. I’ll know it when I see it.
Saint Augustine saith, that Dragons doe abide in deep Caves and hollow places of the earth, and the some-times when they perceive moistnes in the ayre, they come out of theyr holes, and beating the ayre with their wings, as it were with the strokes of Oares, they forsake the earth and flie aloft
—Edward Topsell, The Historie of Serpents, 1608
In the rocks of Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, rest the last bones of the dragon that Perseus slew to save Andromeda. The skulls of similar monsters litter the Sivalik hills in Northern India, and on Turkey’s Aegean coast the remains of fabulous creatures, which stalked the myths of Heracles, weather from the cliffs to astonish passing travellers.
Heracles’ victory against the Monster of Troy is depicted most dramatically on an ancient Greek krater, or vase, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Here is the beast peppered with arrows by the hero as he rescues the Trojan princess Hesione. It is a very peculiar monster: just a head, white and skeletal, but to the modern eye it is impossible to mistake what we are looking at – a fossilised skull of a prehistoric creature projecting from a rocky outcrop; it is a two-and-a-half thousand-year-old black-figure masterpiece of palaeontology.
The vase appears on the cover of Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters, a compelling account of fossil finds in antiquity, which argues that dragons, griffins, cyclops and many other nightmares from the ancient world were inspired by the remains of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. Mayor amasses accounts and archaeological evidence of encounters with giant bones in antiquity, alongside known fossil sites today, which dovetail neatly with the places where the legends of particular monsters first appeared.
In the first century CE, Apollonius of Tyana claimed to have seen dragon skulls in India where today we know the skulls of prehistoric giraffes, elephants and crocodiles are found in the famous Sivalik fossil beds. The Roman naturalist Aelian recorded the discovery of giant bones on the island of Chios following a forest fire and noted that the locals decided they must be the bones of a dragon: ‘From these gigantic bones the villagers were able to observe how immense and awful the monster was when it was alive.’ As for the dragons at Jaffa, biblical Joppa, a story from Ancient