Chipstead

1811: I am told that Lewis’s Topographical dictionary of England, 1811, has the following: ‘In the churchyard is an old yew tree, measuring 20 feet in circumference 3 feet from the ground’.
In 1865 A handbook for travellers in Surrey, Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight by King and Murray reported ‘a very large and fine yew’ growing north of the church.
In 1880 Straker recorded that the male yew growing to the NE had a girth of 22′ 9” (693cm).
In the 1912 Byways in British Archaeology the photo shown here appeared on p379. The tree was described as having a girth of 25ft at 4ft.
In The King’s England, Mee (1936) reported ‘a magnificent yew (21′ round) which shades a doorway 800 years old’.
Around 1946 the Rev T. Grigg-Smith reported to Cornish ‘a fine yew reputed to be 1,000 years old’.
Swanton saw it in 1955 and measured 17′ at the base and 22′ at 3′. It was a male tree and the ‘interstices in the trunk have been filled with cement’. He went on to describe that ‘it is on the north side of the church, an unusual position, but it overshadows a blocked up doorway of Transitional Norman date, so that formerly the villagers passed this tree as they entered the edifice’.
The tree fell in the storm of 1987.