When I was a kid, I picked a leaf from the fig tree at St Newlyn East church, in the village inland from Newquay. My mum knew the warning attached to it and reacted with considerable alarm. For a while, she did not even want to get back in the car with me.
I did get home. At the time of writing, I am still here.
That is inconvenient for the curse, but useful for the article.
The memory is of a real local tradition attached to a real tree. Historic England’s church listing records the fig growing from the south wall and its reputed magical properties. The difficult question is how old the particular stories about it are.
A staff puts down roots
One version connects the tree with St Newlina. The saint arrives, plants her staff and establishes a sacred place; the staff takes root as the fig. Later warnings make picking a leaf dangerous, sometimes fatally so.
It is an exceptionally effective arrangement for a story. The church supplies antiquity. The unusual tree supplies something you can point at. The curse gives children a reason to remember both.
None of that dates the tradition. A story can be well known locally without having survived unchanged from the early Middle Ages.
A child does not receive a warning like that as a footnote in a folklore collection. It comes from an adult who appears to know something important. The tree is right there. The leaf is in your hand. Suddenly you are personally involved in a much larger administrative problem.
That is what makes my memory useful here. Not as proof that the tree could hurt anyone, but as evidence of how a local story gets into your life. You remember the reaction as much as the explanation. Long after the precise wording has gone, you can still remember that picking the leaf was apparently a very bad idea.
And the tree’s location gives the warning authority. This is not a rumour about somewhere nobody has seen. It is an unusual living thing growing from a church wall, available for inspection. If folklore were designing its own exhibition, it would struggle to improve the arrangement.
A twentieth-century source trail
Plant-Lore’s account raises a useful complication. It says Edgar Thurston photographed the tree in his 1930 book without mentioning the saint legend, and traces the saint-and-staff version it found to a village vicar in the 1930s.
The account leaves open whether the vicar recorded an existing tradition or helped shape the version subsequently repeated.
An omission in a book cannot prove a story did not exist. Equally, a twentieth-century retelling does not become medieval evidence because its main character is a saint.
The tree’s saintly ancestry is therefore a tradition with a changing paper trail, not a securely dated medieval biography.
The newspapers join in
Plant-Lore also reproduces a 1958 Sunday Express account about men who pruned the tree and survived. An accident involving other tree work later gave the curse fresh material to absorb. Such stories are good at retaining the unfortunate event while becoming less interested in everybody who remained perfectly well.
A separate contemporary source strengthens another part of the chronology. The Freethinker of 24 July 1964, citing the Daily Herald earlier that month, reported that the fig had broken near the base of its trunk and that the vicar wanted the remains cleared.
The report gives the story a splendid reversal: people had been worrying about what the tree might do to them, and then the tree itself needed attention. The history of its physical growth and the history of its reputation were proceeding on rather different terms.
The part I can remember
My childhood recollection does not establish the curse’s age or power. It establishes that the warning was being passed on seriously enough to produce a memorable reaction.
Folklore does not have to be ancient to become part of somebody’s childhood. It needs a teller, a listener and a place which makes the story feel specific. This one had all three, plus a leaf I had already picked.
The neighbouring histories in The Ancient Circle That Isn’t — and the Ancient Circle That Is show how easily a place’s appearance can persuade us of its age. The fig does something similar through its story: saint, church, unusual growth, warning. The whole arrangement feels as though it must have been there forever.
For now, the curse has failed to dispose of me and succeeded in making the tree unforgettable. That is quite an achievement for a leaf.