“I had this in my workshop for about a week and I came in one day and one of the people I work with was just hugging it,” said the artist Charlie Whinney, speaking in front of a nearly 2-metre section of the tree’s trunk.
It’s a lump of wood, but it’s not any lump of wood. It’s the largest remaining section of the felled Sycamore Gap tree, and it has gone on public display in Northumberland as if, rightly, it were an Old Master painting.
Unlike an Old Master though, visitors will be allowed to touch it and there is a real thrill and energy to being able to do that.
“I’ve been working with timber and trees for many years and I’m normally pretty unsentimental to be honest,” said Whinney. “A tree is a tree. But this project has changed how I view things … This tree meant so much to so many people.”
Whinney has created an exhibition that opens one year after the Sycamore Gap tree was felled illegally.
Also on display are photographs people sent in that they took when the tree was living. But it’s not the tree that stands out, said Tony Gates, the chief executive of Northumberland national park.
“What stands out to me is the the look on people’s faces. It’s just pure, unbridled joy of people in a place that made them feel good.”
The Sycamore Gap tree on Hadrian’s Wall, which was probably 120 years old, was one of the most adored trees anywhere, becoming known as the Robin Hood tree after it featured in the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
After it was toppled, its custodians invited the public to come up with ideas about how it might be commemorated.
There were more than 2,000 responses, some of them wilder than others. “We have had people proposing that we physically lift the tree back on to the stump,” said Andrew Poad, the National Trust’s general manager of its Hadrian’s Wall properties.
“That we stitch it back in the hope that it might regrow. People were offering to pay for it to be done. It may have been done elsewhere but with the wind you get round here, it wouldn’t have stayed up very long.”
The majority of the suggestions were good and from the heart. “There is a PhD thesis to be written about how powerful a connection one tree can have with people,” said Poad.
It was decided there was no need for a memorial at the site itself, because shoots were spotted growing from the stump over the summer.
First there were eight spotted. Today there are about 25. What happens next is down to nature. No one knows whether a dominant shoot will grow into anything like what was there before.
“We have absolutely no idea,” said Gates. “It’s too early to call. Let’s just see what the tree gives us. Let us enjoy the fact it is still there.”
The exhibition coincides with an announcement that 49 saplings from the Sycamore Gap tree are being made available to communities across the UK.
For the next four weeks members of the public can nominate a place they feel deserves to have one of what the National Trust is calling ‘trees of hope’.
The trust named two places on Friday as examples of places which would receive a sapling in the hope it would inspire applicants.
One is Tina’s Haven in County Durham, a planned community nature reserve that is part of a programme that helps women recovering from addiction and trauma. The other will be known as Fergus’s tree in a park in Blackwell near Bristol in memory of boy who died of bone cancer at the age of 12.
The Sycamore Gap art exhibition is at the Sill visitor centre near Hadrian’s Wall, where 240 children from 13 local schools took part in a celebration of the tree’s life on Friday before it opens to the public on Saturday.
As well as seeing the trunk, visitors will be asked to make their own “promises to nature”, which will become part of a second phase of the exhibition. It is a way of looking forward, said Whinney. “This is not a shrine.”
Two men charged with criminal damage over the felling of the tree will face a crown court trial at a crown court. They have denied the charges.
