The Sycamore Gap tree, a beloved way marker, had grown for centuries along Hadrian’s Wall in England before vandals cut it down last year. Now little shoots have been discovered growing at its stump. Jason Lock/National Trust
When this act of vandalism was in the news last year, it felt terrible but had no meaning. But if the felled tree is giving new life, we must celebrate that:
Tiny Sprouts Spotted at the Stump of the Fallen Sycamore Gap Tree
Gary Pickles, a ranger at Hadrian’s Wall Path National Trail, inspecting the Sycamore Gap tree shoots that recently appeared. Jason Lock/National Trust
Vandals last year chopped down the famed tree, which had stood on Hadrian’s Wall in England for nearly 200 years.
On a fine, bright morning last Friday, just like so many other fine, bright mornings, Gary Pickles took a walk.
Mr. Pickles and a colleague at the site where the tree once stood. Jason Lock/National Trust
Mr. Pickles, a ranger who works at Northumberland National Park in England, just south of the Scottish border, was inspecting a route that wends past Hadrian’s Wall, constructed by the Roman Army in the second century A.D. He walked past the cleft where the Sycamore Gap tree had famously jutted out into the landscape before it was illegally cut down last year, and he bent down to its stump.
Astonishingly, improbably, there were eight shoots where the tree once stood. Eight signs of life.
“It was like when you see an old friend,” Mr. Pickles, 54, said. “‘Oh, you’re back, are you?’”
Mr. Pickles’s discovery, announced on Thursday by the park and the National Trust, a British conservation society, is a step toward national healing. The felling of the tree last September shocked and horrified many British people. Why would anyone ax something so lovely, so alive?
“People felt like their landscape — their heritage — was violated,” said Rob Collins, a professor at Newcastle University who is a specialist in Hadrian’s Wall archaeology.
The police conducted a swift investigation, and a legal process is underway: Two men were charged in April in connection to the felling. They are set to appear in court this month, the BBC reported.
But for many people, the arrests have done little to heal the void at the ancient wall. Like the flames that destroyed the Notre-Dame Cathedral in 2019, the vandals’ chain saw had cut through a sacred piece of national heritage. And the wall yawns with the absence of the tree, almost like an empty seat at a holiday table…
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