Five female yews grow at the ruins of Deer Abbey in Aberdeenshire. Probably from two different planting dates, the earliest likely to be around 400 years ago.
Deer Abbey is associated with the Book of Deer, a manuscript thought to have been made in the AD 900s, which includes the whole of the New Testament Gospel of St. John and parts of the other three Gospels, an early version of the Apostles’ Creed, and a later charter granted to the monks by King David I of Scotland. Whilst it wasn’t written at Deer it was in the abbey’s possession from at least the 1100s and became known as the ‘Book of Deer’. Gaelic notes written in the book describe the founding of
the early monastery by St Columba.