What we lost with the fallen sycamore

I don’t know about you, but my reaction to learning about the felling of that tree in Northumberland was, well, weird. For a start, unlike many others, I’ve never hugged this lovely tree, never picnicked beneath it, never proposed next to it, never seen it after a long satisfying hike along Hadrian’s Wall, so I do not have much personal connection.

In fact, I’ve never even been there. My only knowledge of the sycamore gap sycamore is seeing it in the Hollywood movie, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which in turn – along with some later, pretty images of snowbound hills and auroral lights – slowly induced this extremely vague sense that up there, in far northern England, there was this splendid tree that one day I might visit, maybe, who knows.

I mean, it is just a tree. That I saw in a film. Never in the flesh or the bark.