Here in Scotland, in Perthshire, there is a very old yew tree, believed to be at least two millenia old, under which local folklore claims Pontius Pilate was born and played as a child.
Was Pilate born in Scotland? What evidence, if any, connects him with the country in general and Perthshire in particular?
There's no evidence other than the folk tale.
To further throw a spanner in the works Pontius Pilate passed away in 37 AD while the Roman invasion of Britain didn't even begin until 43 AD. There's no record anywhere of a pre invasion Caledonii becoming a governor of Judea which would be something of note.
The legend associating Pontius Pilate with the Fortingall Yew is quite interesting as a peice of folklore. The history of this legend can be traced back to a poem titled "The Queen's Visit" in 1869 by Samuel Ferguson. Queen Victoria loved the region of Perthshire around Atholl and Breadalbane and the poem suggests Fortingall was an area the Queen visited. In the 19th century many ‘traditions’ were instituted to link Queen Victoria to a variety of communities. This occured with the Glastonbury Thorn. And it may have been the birth of the poetical association of Pilate with Fortingall. He gives little information in his poem though, and the details the legend has accrued, of Pilate playing under the tree, and of being the son of a Roman Amassador and a local woman, and of later studying with the Druids, seems to originate from other sources.
On the other hand, Ferguson may have been genuinely relating a much older tradition. However, the Yew had been mentioned by a number of other writers before Ferguson, in 1769, 1777, and 1840, but only to comment on its size, age, and ruin (there was a fashion for a time for gentlemen to enjoy travelling the country 'tree-watching'). If the legend of Pilate was older than Ferguson's poem, these other commentators should perhaps have mentioned it. Though their silence can not be taken as certain evidence of the legend's absence, perhaps they just weren't interested in folktales, only botany.
However, more tellingly for the purposes of tracing this peice of folklore is a record in 1849 from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge which was interested in local folklore regarding the Fortingall Yew. Their tract The Life of a Tree, and a subsequent tract produced by the Religious Tract Society in 1866 Beauties and Wonders of Vegetable Life record the local custom of funerary processions passing the corpse through the tree (the Yew is split by age so one could walk between the two remnants of its trunk). They record that "the dead to be carried through the hollow, solemn-looking tree, in their passage to the resting-place where the rich and the poor rest together, and where the last remains of our mortal bodies shall slumber until the morning of the Resurrection." This interest in local folklore, with its absence of any mention of Pontius Pilate suggests a little more storngly that it was an invention of Ferguson created between 1866 and 1869.
There are genuine ancient customs and folk beliefs associated with Yew trees, and these would have been associated with the Fortingall specimen also. They have long been associated with death and rebirth. This may have led to the legend of Pontius Pilate being considered appropriate to attach to the tree, given his central role in the gospel story of Christ's death and ressurrection.