Recent studies have shown that the four famous, ancient Yews of Borrowdale may be older, and more closely related to one another, than previously thought.
Just south of Keswick lies the Borrowdale Valley, one of the most wooded, oak-dominated valleys in the Lake District. The Borrowdale Oakwoods, or Atlantic Oakwoods, are the remnants of a once vast oak forest that cloaked much of the northwestern seaboard of Europe, from Scotland south to northern Spain. Today only fragments remain, the finest of which are on the west coast of Scotland.