“It was the perfect tree, in the perfect place.” So said poet, performer, writer and broadcaster Kate Fox, in launching a book of poems at Waterstones in Newcastle to commemorate the shocking felling of the Sycamore Gap tree on Hadrian’s Wall, a year ago.

The tree had been known to many northerners for a long time, well before it featured in a scene from the 1991 Kevin Costner Hollywood film, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. By the time I moved north two years ago it had become that much over-used word, an icon, featuring in many photographs and on the opening credits of at least one regional news TV programme.

The day after it had been mysteriously and illegally felled by chainsaw, one local TV presenter was on the edge of tears. A county councillor compared the moment to the death of Kennedy. As a southerner, I noted the widespread sense of mourning, but still didn’t quite get it.

It was up to Kate Fox, Bradford-born but north-east based for many years, to put me right. At the launch of On Sycamore Gap, with illustrations by Cat Moore, and published by HarperNorth, she likened the pride felt in the region about the tree, to the same affection for Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North, close to the A1 at Gateshead.

“The north-east is a de-industrialised region that has suffered many social, health and economic inequalities … but there’s something important about a natural symbol. I’ve been trying not to be too enthusiastic about the stump, but it’s sprouting, and I love it. The place is still significant. Look, nature renews.”

In the foreword to the poems she explains that it “felt natural” to tell the story of the tree in an accessible form that echoed the oral storytelling songs and poems known as the Border Ballads, composed during the lawless days of the reivers who marauded for hundreds of years in Hadrian’s Wall country between England and Scotland. The ‘trunk’ of the sequence is interspersed with ‘branches’ in contrasting forms such as haiku, sonnets, and a ‘palindromic’ or ‘mirror’ poem inspired by Brian Bilston’s ‘Refugees’.

That palindromic poem, ‘As Above So Below’, refers to the tree’s roots, and concludes: “Never think that / I was just one tree.” Kate Fox also pointed out that the tree was/is not as old as many thought. It is said to have been planted by John Clayton, Newcastle’s town clerk, who is credited as ‘The Man Who Saved The Wall’ by buying up and excavating substantial portions of Hadrian’s Wall to stop it being built on. The poem about Clayton ends:

 

     The past is more than its objects

     Like firedamp it rises and seeps

     and one way to understand a society

     is through what it loses and what it keeps.    

 

There are poems about the Roman officers’ cult of Mithras – “like the Freemasons, very masculine, something to do with beheading bulls” – and the contrasting worship of the Celtic Coventina, “known even by soldiers / thousands of miles from home. / Honoured for her water, her well. / Gratitude carved in stone.”  

On Wednesday night Kate Fox, resplendent in an autumnal, sycamore-covered dress, said that people had in the past enjoyed visiting the tree: “Now they go there on purpose, on a pilgrimage.” Replying to one audience member who asked whether we were seeing the creation of a place of worship, she replied: “A broken symbol is powerful. When we went there, we did encounter someone praying.” Another questioner wondered whether this outpouring of emotion wasn’t a bit over the top, as when Princess Diana died? Kate Fox said: “I wish everyone would go [to see the stump].”   

The trial of two men from Cumbria who are accused of felling the Sycamore Gap tree is scheduled for December 3, 2024. Both men have pleaded not guilty to the charges of damaging property.

 

Kate Fox, On Sycamore Gap, HarperNorth, £10