Borrowdale - Fraternal Four

June 2002 – Tim Hills: Half of this once formidable tree has fallen and lies on the ground next to the living trunk. Girth was 16′ 7” (506cm) keeping the tape 1′ above the sloping ground.
February 2015: From an article in British Wildlife, pp 178-182 by Maurice Pankhurst, Stuart A’Hara and Joan Cottrell: A few years after the uprooting of tree 4 in 1866 ‘tree 2 was severely damaged, some 50% of it being destroyed. Again, the remains of this section of the tree are still to be seen today’. DNA technology carried out to establish whether any of the yews might be genetic clones established that this yew and tree 1 have identical DNA fingerprints. This means they were either once fragments of a larger tree or, as seems more likely, that one has developed from layered roots of branches of the other, and the article points out that ‘the architecture of the above ground roots is highly suggestive of linkage’.