Wooley: Felling of famous UK ‘Robin Hood tree’ is crying shame

The felling of a 300-year-old sycamore in England raised a lot more eyebrows around the world than it would have had it happened in Tasmania, writes Charles Wooley

“There’s an old tree here, Charlie. This place is called Sycamore Gap and I want to show you because you are always banging on about the trees you’ve got at home.” Behind the wheel Steve Edwards, my London driver, was also my travel guide and a good mate.

“Stevo” would collect me, along with my film crew, from Heathrow and ferry us to our London hotels, “digs” he called them. Sometimes he would take us much further afield.

We carried a van-load of camera and sound gear and in a small country found it easier and quicker to drive than to negotiate regional airports and train stations. Plus, Stevo knew the lie of the land; everywhere from John o’Groats to Lands End he was an expert. “There’s a nice little gaff comin’ up ’ere where you will get a lovely brown ale. Not like that cold watery muck you Aussies drink.”

So, here’s a travelling tip. If you are with a small party, it’s often cheaper to see Britain with a man and a van. Train and plane fares are expensive, as are taxis and hire cars.

In the van you are on the ground and travelling the byways, where there is so much to see.

Which is how when I saw pictures last week of the famous fallen tree at Sycamore Gap in Northumberland, I recognised it immediately. Stevo had already shown me.

“Now, that’s a picture for you,” he had told me years ago, pulling off the A69 in the north of England. “They say it’s the most photographed tree in Britain. Kevin Costner shinnied up it in the Robin Hood movie, and it’s been around they reckon for 300 years.”

We were driving from coast to coast, which in the far north of England is only about 85km. We were following Hadrian’s Wall and Stevo was running the commentary.

“It was built by the Romans in the first century to keep the Jocks north of the border. But a lot of bleedin’ good it did. Today they are all down in London.”

In a rugged and otherwise treeless narrow valley, there it had suddenly appeared: the mighty sycamore was standing like a lone sentinel on the Jocks’ side of Hadrian’s Wall.

In this aerial view the 'Sycamore Gap' tree on Hadrian's Wall lies on the ground leaving behind only a stump in the spot it once proudly stood. The tree, was one of the UK's most photographed and appeared in the 1991 Kevin Costner film "Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves." Picture: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

The Pennine Hills are hard country made of sharp shale and tough limestone. Nothing much grows there. Bracken, heather and some heath grasses, and in the sub-arctic conditions on the day I saw it, the sycamore seemed completely out of place.

No wonder so many tourists had taken its picture.

In the blasted wind rush of the Sycamore Gap, the tree’s improbable survival in the rugged Pennines has made it the most famous tree in England.

And last week some silly bugger cut it down.

It was not a big tree by Tasmanian standards. Only about 30 metres, as compared with our giants in the Florentine Valley, which rise to the height of 30-storey buildings and can be older than 500 years.

But in Britain trees are a bigger deal and the people who felled the Sycamore Gap tree have been denounced the length of the land as vandals. They might even go to jail.

I admit I got it wrong a few weeks back when Sustainable Timber Tasmania (just can’t suppress a wry smile) allowed a photo to be taken of one of the world’s biggest trees being carted off to the mill or the chipper or both. I predicted, because of the sheer size of the log, that the picture would be seen around the country and the world. But as far as I know the image never went beyond the local press – unlike the fallen sycamore, which won the attention of all the British media and has gone around the world. It even reached distant Tasmania, where we might well now ask: “If a tree falls in our forest and

no one hears it, did it really fall?”

The famous tree at Sycamore Gap on Hadrian's Wall, as seen in the classic Kevin Costner movie Robin Hood, Prince Of Thieves, when it was still standing. Picture: iStock

Tasmania definitely flies under the radar, not because we are so cunningly discreet but simply because no one really knows, or wants to know, what’s going on here.

In the UK the usually hard-nosed associate editor of The Independent, Sean O’Grady, took time from the war in Ukraine and all the other big global stories to lament a fallen tree.

“Seeing it lying there, stricken, helpless, slowly dying makes one irrationally depressed – it’s only a tree, you try to tell yourself. But, like many of us, it was a sad – even sickening – sight,’’ he wrote.

“To those who had some connection with it, a marriage, a scattering of ashes, a habitual resting stop, its loss is more akin to a bereavement.

“Many tears have been shed.”

The Brits don’t have enough nature left to be blase, and the felling of a totemic tree is hardly state-sanctioned. Northumbria Police first arrested a 16-year-old boy, who was later bailed. Shortly afterwards they took into custody a man in his 60s, who should have been old enough to know better. But the word from the nearest pub, Northumberland’s The Twice Brewed Inn, is that the man arrested had a grudge against the National Trust, which controls the land around Hadrian’s Wall.

Some grudge.

In this aerial view the 'Sycamore Gap' tree on Hadrian's Wall lies on the ground leaving behind only a stump in the spot it once proudly stood. Picture: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Locals report the Sycamore Gap tree was dropped in a matter of minutes during a 133km/h storm, which would have conveniently disguised the sound of the chainsaw.

Such an offence can apparently attract 10 years’ imprisonment.

In the case of the kid, in mitigation I would argue for a traditional English punishment: transportation to Van Diemens Land.

I think I know exactly where that boy could find suitable employment.

Finally, it is indeed a small world. The Twice Brewed Inn was the very pub where years ago Stevo suggested I try “a real beer, not like that watery muck you Aussies drink”.

He was right. It wasn’t at all like it.

But if you’re ever there, it’s a friendly place and the onion soup was excellent.

Pity about the sycamore.

Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian-based journalist.