Saint Kevin's Yew Tree, Sevenchurches, Co. Wicklow

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Holy Sites & Wells

Saint Kevin’s Yew Tree, Sevenchurches, Co. Wicklow

At Glendalough's monastic valley in County Wicklow, the Ordnance Survey once saw fit to name a single yew tree on its maps.

Not a church, not a round tower, not a carved stone, but a tree, identified by name across two separate editions of the six-inch survey as St. Kevin's Yew Tree. That a cartographic record was made of it at all suggests it carried real significance in the landscape, the kind of quiet sacred weight that attached itself to ancient yews in Irish devotional tradition, where a venerable tree growing beside a holy site could be as much an object of reverence as any built structure.

The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map placed the tree's name to the south-west of the cathedral at Glendalough, with a lone tree shown immediately west of the label, positioned due south of and in line with the west gable of Our Lady's Church. In the later edition, the name shifted to the north-west of the cathedral, but no tree was marked at all. Whether the tree had already gone by then, or whether the cartographers simply stopped recording it, is not clear. What is certain is that no surface trace of it survives today. There is nothing left to see, no stump, no root line, no obvious hollow in the ground where it once stood. The tree exists now only as a place-name floating in archive copies of old maps, its precise location subtly contradicted between one edition and the next.

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