The tragic felling of the tree is making land managers reflect on how this barren landscape should look in future
Last Wednesday night, Britain was robbed of one of its best-loved trees. Mike Pratt, the CEO of Northumberland Wildlife Trust, describes the venerable, now-recumbent sycamore at Sycamore Gap on Hadrian’s Wall as a “totem tree; a touch point in the landscape”.
But the tree, standing alone in a national park, also reminded some of how nature-depleted England is. As environmentalist Ben Goldsmith said at the time: “That someone would have destroyed this iconic tree is beyond comprehension; but what’s even more shocking is that this was pretty much the only tree in that entire landscape. Our national parks can and should be so much better.”
According to Northumberland Wildlife Trust’s latest estimates, just 7% of Northumberland meets the criteria needed for the UK government to fulfil its commitment to protect and prioritise 30% of the landscape for nature by 2030 – which is a little higher than the 5% average across England as a whole.
While Goldsmith overstates the case somewhat, low tree cover does partly explain why Northumberland is sometimes called the “land of far horizons”. The most remote and least populated of England’s national parks, its rolling hills are swathed by expansive areas of open moor, peatland, as well as large forestry plantations.
In common with most other national parks in Britain, much of this land is grazed by sheep and cattle. As Pratt explains, over decades and centuries, agriculture has gradually become more intensive, with the result that areas of the national park are now almost devoid of trees and “feel a little bit industrial in parts”, he says. This is not the fault of individual farmers, Pratt argues. “It’s just that no one’s ever made any big decisions about what it should look like, probably since Roman times.”
Now, the felling of the tree at Sycamore Gap has given local communities and land managers a reason to reflect on, and make some serious choices about, how this landscape should look and function in the years to come.
A vision of renewal
From Pratt’s perspective, the corridor of land that roughly follows Hadrian’s Wall, from England’s east coast to west, is “possibly the biggest opportunity for a wilder landscape in England”.
On Wednesday, Northumberland national park authority announced its plans for how one part of that corridor would be renewed, with a new project signalling “a transformative shift towards a nature-first approach to land management”.
The project has been two years in the planning, but unveiling it this week, in the immediate aftermath of loss of the region’s most famous tree, felt like a fitting riposte to that crime. Tony Gates, chief executive of the National Park Authority, explained in a press release that his team decided it was imperative to seize the moment. “We are living through a nature crisis, a climate crisis and a wellbeing crisis,” he writes. “We must use this strength of feeling to drive change, for nature recovery and for our health and wellbeing.”
