My walk to Sycamore Gap and some thoughts

“This oak tree and me, we’re made of the same stuff.” Carl Sagan

There has been a great outpouring of emotion and some anger this week and not just on social media about the Sycamore Gap tree. For those who have no idea you can read the story here.
I thought I would tell of my own walk to that tree one grey October day some years ago and share some thoughts as to why it’s felling may have touched people’s emotions.

It’s only a short walk from Steel Rigg car park to Sycamore Gap, less than two miles. Mrs E wanted to visit the tree because Kevin Costner had in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves. I wanted to visit it because I’ve seen countless pictures of it over the years and the tree is somewhat of an iconic landmark for the outdoor and walking community.

I had been there before. On Sunday 17th September 1989 my mate Gary and I were two days away from finishing the Pennine Way. My walking journal of that day records that it was ‘a long hard day of 22 miles’, it was ‘dry and sunny’ and the wall was ‘very impressive’. The Pennine Way passes the tree but in 1989 we never gave it a second look or even thought about taking a picture of it. Wainwright mentions it, as you would expect from a man of detail, ‘Solitary Sycamore in Walled Enclosure’ is his understated description without fanfare in the Pennine Way Companion.

So although the tree is probably three hundred years old, the interest in it seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon. In those days of course there was no such thing as ‘social media’. We took pictures, but they could not be shared with the whole world and Social was what happened at a working men’s club on Saturday night, Media was the newspapers and television.

Greater interest in the tree I would guess came about due to the birth of Social Media and the self generating echo chamber that it creates. The tree has tens of thousands of pictures of it on Instagram which then encourages others, like me, to go and take their own.

I also wanted to visit the tree because it is on Hadrians Wall, the furthest northern outpost of an empire that lasted nearly a thousand years. I have an interest in Roman history and places, probably because I was brought up in Chester, the old Roman fortress town of Deva, and walking along two thousand year old Roman walls passing by a Roman amphitheatre was taken for granted.

And so it was we walked alongside Hadrians wall on a rather cold, drizzly day to visit the Sycamore Gap tree. The wall follows an undulating ridge and passes by Milecastle thirty nine, the Romans were nothing but efficient and had mini turrets at regular intervals. The first glimpse of the tree is from above, naturally because it sits in a gap between high ground. There were a few people about but not many, the weather probably putting them off. I took some OK pictures and Mrs E dreamt about Kevin Costner before we walked back to the van on the lower path for a cup of tea.

And now the tree of ten thousand photographs, a place where people proposed to each other, scattered the ashes of their loved ones underneath and found joy in has gone, criminally chopped down in the middle of the night.

It is a tragedy, it was a living, breathing organic creature and it’s felling was a senseless act. But we live in a complex, inequitable and unequal world. A world where the felling of one tree gets more publicity and outpouring of emotion than the felling of millions in the rainforest. A world where the tragic death of one person can get more attention than the deaths of thousands of nameless ones drowned in the Mediterranean or starving to death in Yemen. Who judges what tragedies are worthy of our emotions?

Maybe the outpouring of emotion is a symbol of a greater loss that we are feeling in this country over things that used to be stable, secure and permanent but are no longer. Change unsettles us.

There is good news however. The tree is not dead because it’s roots are not dead. The life of a tree is not in its leaves, which come and go with the seasons but in its roots, deep and secure, safe from harm and the vagaries of the weather, and even people with chainsaws.

In time, and in hope, the tree will start to recover and grow again. Different from what it was but the same tree, maybe even stronger because of the trauma and misfortune it has gone through.

And that surely is a message of hope for all of us. Not just trees.

To see a map and route of this walk please click on ‘Learn more’ below