Churches on TMA

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Pete G P
Pete G Jan 26, 2003 00:20:05
Replying to FourWinds

Phnar Phnar,
I get your point, I didn't mean ALL churches but some of them are really amazing!
I'm suprised that the Druids don't go them more often, they alwys bang on about sacred groves.
I could take you to a Yew tree in a church yard that we could get 60 people under the bows that grow into the earth.
Now thats a grove and something I think is well worth documenting as ancient! Some of the yews I know of are over 2,000 years old so they are the nearest living thing we have to the past.
The Church just robbed these sites from the pagans who in turn robbed them from our remote ancestors.
Ironicaly if we were allowed to excavte church graveyards we would probably learn more about our ancestors than a lot of designated Neolithic sites that we now plunder freely.
PeteG

N nigelswift
nigelswift Jan 26, 2003 08:07:31
Replying to Pete G

Some yews may be older still, so an even more accurate sign of a place having Neolithic significance.
Pinched from my post on another forum:

Allegedly, one churchyard yew in Wales dates from 2000 BC.
http://216.239.37.100/search?q=cache:VrQF7qedRp4C:www.walesdirectory.co.uk/history.htm+neolithic+yew&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

It is suggested that the ability for seedlings to fuse with the original effectively makes yews immortal. “Europe’s oldest”, in Scotland, (again, with a bronze age barrow near to it) is claimed to be 9000 years old!
http://www.cvni.org/articles/august2001/yew.html

One speculation has it that “the research carried out on ancient yews by Allen Meredith has shown that the original temples themselves were built on these sites because of the presence there of what was already an ancient tree, which symbolised everlasting life or life after death to the Celts. By Allen Meredith's reckoning, one can date the site of the original temple to be Neolithic where the church is to the south of the yew.”
http://www.treeman.co.uk/ (click on oldest yews). I think this is suggesting that current old yews may imply previous revered old yews. If this was right, a mere “stripling” present day yew of say 1500 years could be a pointer to Neolithic significance of a site.