Owen Garling reflects on the conviction of two men for the felling of the iconic Sycamore Gap tree, exploring how the Bennett Institute's framework for measuring social and cultural infrastructure can help explain its value.
The trial at Newcastle Crown Court of two men accused of cutting down a tree on Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland has recently ended with Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers being found guilty of taking a chainsaw to the tree and felling it for no discernible reason.
Following the tree’s felling in 2023 there has been, and continues to be, an outpouring of emotion from members of the public who felt a particular connection with it. The National Trust, who owned the land on which the tree grew, received nearly 500 applications for 49 seedlings from the tree and described how “every application for a ‘Tree of Hope’ told heartfelt stories of people’s emotional connections to the Sycamore Gap tree and the importance of nature. They spoke of loss, hope and regeneration from towns, schools, colleges, community groups, hospitals and hospices.”
And yet in his defence, Adam Carruthers claimed that comments that he had made after the tree was felled was because he “didn’t understand how a tree would be able to hit the headlines as much as it did… It was as if someone had been murdered”. As the prosecuting counsel put it to him, in his view, “it’s just a tree”.
At the recent launch event for our report on the measurement of social and cultural infrastructure, the Sycamore Gap tree was raised as an example of social and cultural infrastructure by Professor Fiona Stafford, one of the members of the British Academy steering group for the project.
Our work on social and cultural infrastructure has explored how those assets displaying the characteristics of social and cultural infrastructure can best be measured. Whilst this category of assets includes all those that would be expected, such as parks, libraries, museums, community centres, and art galleries, our approach enables other assets that play an important role in the social and cultural life of communities to be included in the measurement process.
The Sycamore Gap tree is therefore a particularly interesting case study to which our framework could be applied.
First, does (did?) the Sycamore Gap tree display the characteristics of a piece of social and cultural infrastructure? To determine this, we need to ask a number of questions.
According to the National Trust, the tree had been planted in the late 1800’s by the previous landowner, and so the first test is clearly met. Whilst not the oldest tree in the country, the sycamore had lived for approximately 160 years, was in good health, and so could reasonably have been expected to live for anywhere between another 50 and 250 years.
The tree’s location on Hadrian’s Wall within the Northumberland National Park, demonstrates that the second test could also be met – the tree was available to all; after it’s felling, people spoke of the wide range of different activities that they connected the tree with; and finally, the tree could be appreciated by different people at the same time, making it non-rival. Interestingly, after it was felled, the National Trust had to close the closest car park because of the number of visitors, meaning that following its demise this characteristic may not have been so easily met.
Finally, did the tree enable the building of relationships, the exploration of identities, meaning making or creative expression? Following its felling, people spoke of the connections that they had with the tree, with the BBC curating a page of memories of the tree. The incident has also led to a range of different creative expressions, from the Northumberland National Park Authority calling for creatives to celebrate the legacy of the tree, to the nature-writer and academic Robert MacFarlane writing a libretto for a full-length choral work called The World Tree, in part a “requiem for the [felled] Sycamore Gap tree.”
From this it can be seen that the Sycamore Gap tree does display the characteristics that we have set out for social and cultural infrastructure. As we can see the tree as part of our shared social and cultural infrastructure, can we therefore use the framework to measure its value?
Our framework is made up of three phases and six steps as set out below.
Whilst it is perhaps easy to lament the loss of a tree and want to understand its value, as we set out in the report “measurement succeeds only when its purpose is warranted, clear, and specific”. For example, in bringing the case to trial, the Crown Prosecution Service had a reason to value the damage to the tree to enable them to understand the charges that should be brought and the penalties that could be imposed if the defendants were found guilty. Other parties that may be interested in valuing the tree could include the Northumberland National Park Authority and the National Trust, both of whom may be interested in understanding the ways in which the destruction of the tree has impacted on the users of the national park.
The second phase asks users to identify which social and cultural infrastructural assets are included in the process of measurement and then consider how best to measure provision and access and use. Whilst we have focused on identifying the Sycamore Gap tree as a social and cultural infrastructural asset, it did not exist in a vacuum. From its place on Hadrian’s Wall to its location in a national park, the tree was part of a wider network of social and cultural infrastructure that may also need to be taken into account. In terms of measuring provision, measures such as visitor numbers and proximity to communities could be included. For understanding its access and use, there is now a body of evidence as set out in the BBC article above, about how people connected with the tree that could be drawn upon.
The third phase calls for the evidence gathered to be appropriately represented and analysed before being used to support the reasons for measurement as set out above. One of the intricacies that can be derived from this example is the need to bring together a range of different forms of evidence or insights into the value of social and cultural infrastructure. How, for example, would one combine visitor numbers and evidence of who is visiting with the cultural responses to the felling of the tree – from people’s Instagram pages through to a full-length choral requiem? These are the kind of questions that we are interested in exploring with partners who are interested in putting the framework into practice. As well as these insights, we should also consider the opinions of those such as the defendants, who did not see the same value in the tree.
Writing in The Observer following the conclusion of the trial and the surrounding media attention, Melanie Reid took the side of the defendants, arguing: “Nobody got it. Nobody saw that Graham and Carruthers lived on the margins of society. That they came from North Cumbria, where 29 communities are within the ten per cent most deprived areas of England, a heartland of the poor North where Reform is growing, where the failure to understand the lives of the awkward, the cynical and sometimes not-so-bright is unravelling politics.”
To conclude, the story of the Sycamore Gap tree displays one of the features that we regularly see all too often in stories about our shared social and cultural infrastructure. It is not until the asset is lost that we start to consider its value. We hope that our work helps communities to make explicit the often implicit understanding of the value and importance of such assets, so that they can be articulated with the same sort of vigour when they are still in place as they are when they have been lost or are under threat. We know how important these assets are, we have just not had a rigorous way of understanding their importance until now.
The title of this blog is the title of a poem by Edward Thomas: “First known when lost“.
Image: By Clementp.fr – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115374211
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
