At some point during Wednesday night last week, when Britain was being battered by Storm Agnes, a person – or perhaps more than one – walked up to one of the country’s most famous and beloved trees, fired up a two-metre chainsaw and began to cut.
In as little as half an hour, the Sycamore Gap had been reduced to a gap. The tree that filled that little U-shaped dell in Hadrian’s Wall and was thought to be up to 300 years old was gone. What was left was a gaping, empty hole. Not only in that sweep of tree-scarce Northumberland landscape that once demarked the Roman empire’s northern limits, but in the lives of the many people from all over the world who had taken that lone tree, defiantly clinging on to those windy northern moors, to heart. People who grew up, as I did, wrapping arms around it on long walks along the wall in waterproofs and who later returned with their own children to do the same. People who scattered the ashes of their loved ones around its roots. People who visited it religiously through the seasons and sought shelter from sun and showers under its canopy; who saw its leaves fire in the autumn and its stark silhouette scratched black into a cold, winter sky.
