Stumped.

I like trees as much as the next man, provided the next man isn’t some thick-as-mince Northumbrian with an itchy chainsaw finger. Oddly enough I had read something about Sycamore Gap a few months ago and was half-heartedly half-filled with a faint feeling of nostalgia for the time I went to the cinema in Harrow to see Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves. At the time I was thoroughly entertained, or at least as thoroughly entertained as it is possible to be by a film with Christian Slater in. Repeated viewings over the last 32 years (oh my, where have those years gone?) have exposed the film for exactly what it is: a lengthy exercise in Hollywood molestation that is just about held together by a super-ham Alan Rickman and a version of Kevin Costner that is nowhere near as good as the version we have now. And to anyone who has never been to Sycamore Gap, on Hadrian’s Wall in Northumbria, but has seen that film that is all the frame of reference they will have. Until now.

And I am sort of one of those people. If I hadn’t watched that film I would probably never have known about Sycamore Gap or cared to know any more than nothing. I don’t feel particularly embarrassed by that because no-one ever told me I had to know about every aesthetically pleasing tree in Britain (besides, aren’t all trees supposed to be beautiful?) though there is a tiny drop of remorse in knowing that I will never see that tree in all its glory; a drop of remorse that can just go straight into the vast tank of remorse for all the things I have and haven’t done. But what’s the point in worrying about that now? I had no plans to go and see it and, on a broader scale, I have never harboured any sort of itching desire to do anything at all related to that part of the world. If I went to Hadrian’s Wall as a kid then I can’t remember it and I certainly wouldn’t want to go there now – to see the remnants of a wall that failed entirely to do what it was built for, which was to keep the Scots out. Indeed it was a total failure, an almost laughable failure, as England is now stuffed with millions of Scots who spend their time poetically championing the beauty of a country they no longer live in or rarely, if ever, wish to return to.

The shock of seeing the sycamore tree at Sycamore Gap (or, as it should be renamed if we’re going to be pedantic, simply Gap) brutally cut down is a shock that is genuine. That said, before we turn an eye on the perpetrators, it might be worth just standing back for a moment and looking at this incident and that tree with a little perspective. For a start it’s just a tree. It’s sad that it will no longer be there but given the brazillions of trees we’ve cut down overall it really isn’t that big a deal. Secondly, you can’t help but notice that as an object it wasn’t so much admired for its virtues as a tree (leafy, barky etc) as for the fact it made a nice, lazy screen saver for every third rate photographer and Instagram whore out there. People just wanted it in a photo to prove they had gone on a walk in the country and now they’re all upset because they’ll have to find something else to snap and post on Facebook, along with an update on the current state of their mental health and their views on speed limits in urban areas. These people may not have killed that tree but they are guilty of using it as a prop; nothing more than a backdrop to their lust for attention and vacuous validation.

Through time this tree, unwittingly, also represents a truth about Britain that we seem to hold in denial. The felling of this proud sycamore acts as something like a full stop on our nation as a worthwhile entity. The experts say it has been there for 300 hundred years, making it even older than Rupert Murdoch (though in fairness it actually looked younger than him) which means it has been here through all the growth, glory, shame and decline of the British Empire, and surely the soul of that tree must have felt a profound sense of an ending when it realised that Liz Truss had somehow become Prime Minister for a doomed afternoon last year. Perhaps the sycamore at Sycamore Gap was meant to be felled, as a symbolic gesture to make everyone acknowledge what a huge, badly organised, malodourous charity shop Britain has become. Perhaps we no longer deserve a sycamore at Sycamore Gap. Perhaps the forced withdrawal of its beauty is a punishment for letting everything get so bleakly out of hand.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But probably perhaps not, because it appears that rather than being a totemic metaphor of some description the right nasty doing over at Sycamore Gap is in truth simply a symptom of our cultural malaise. The reports say a 16 year old boy (if you can help cut down a big tree with a chainsaw then you shouldn’t be treated like a boy, certainly not in the eyes of any law that makes sense) and a 60 year old man have been arrested and there is now a hint that this random act of stupid, stupid, cruel stupidity might have been carried out in an attempt to get more views on TikTok. If that turns out to be the case then I’m afraid the murder of the tree at Sycamore Gap may be, for what it represents, one of the saddest events in recent history and the final nail in the coffin of common sense. Let’s face it, this country has been flagging since before World War II and now, with this one event, we have reached our lowest ebb. On reflection, if anything I’m now more likely to go up and see the scene of the crime (but I won’t). I can walk down one bit of the wall and up the other and try to capture the sense of loss, and there will be a much better chance now of not bumping into an endless stream of North Face twats in hiking boots, each carrying a camera lens the size of a dishwasher and waffling bollocks about capturing the right light. I might even wave at Scotland, though I doubt Scotland will wave back. There once was a tree at Sycamore Gap but now there is just a stump and memories. I like trees as much as the next man but there’s not much point crying over chainsawed wood. It’s just the way people are these days and there’s certainly nothing the trees can do about it.

G B Burton. 30.09.2023