In this lovely cliff-enclosed town, St Mary’s church is further encircled by a dozen yews which create a dense green palisade around the churchyard. It has also given rise to an inner sphere of gloom about the building, and perhaps it’s this that is implicated in the beautiful shape to one yew next to the church. It’s a big, multi-stemmed veteran that must have been pruned recently, and the invasion of light has triggered large amounts of growth right along each of its branches from trunk to twig-end. But the new stuff has grown bolt upright and at right angles to the limbs. These old and newer parts remind me of an entire wood of thick dark trunks with an understorey of green twiggy growth, but all emanating from a single organism. Churchyard yews are steeped in ancient magic and mystery. One myth is that their wood was used in the making of longbows, and the trees were sited in medieval churchyards where livestock had no access to their poisonous leaves. All parts of it – except the red arils of the fruits – are toxic, and a farmer friend recently told me how a gardener, unversed in the ways of yew, slung cuttings over a wall that killed nine of their cattle. Yews love Derbyshire’s limestone, but their bad reputation has chased many of them out on to the bare cliffs and crags, where neither farmers nor cows can reach them. However, churchyard trees like these in Cromford were never planted to supply the manufacture of bows, because that timber came mainly from Iberia. Our area certainly retains some wonderful ecclesiastical representatives. A yew at St Helen’s in Darley Dale has a medieval waistline of over eight metres, and another near here, known as Betty Kenny’s Tree, was reputed to be 2,000 years old and credited as the origin of the nursery rhyme Bye Baby Bunting. The Cromford yews are also legendary, if only among naturalists, because their copious seeds are a winter lure for one of the most elusive, beautiful and sought-after of all Britain’s birds, the wonderfully misnamed hawfinch. To date, however, this bit of yew magic continues to elude me.