Sycamore Gap, Dark Hedges and more: Britain's lost trees

THE loss of the Sycamore Gap tree to apparent vandalism should heighten concern about the large numbers of veteran and iconic trees being lost. These are trees which are often legally felled at national government or local authority direction because they are in the way of new development, causing damage to existing infrastructure and buildings, or posing a health and safety risk. Some are lost to an unavoidable combination of old age and inclement weather, which is sad nevertheless.

The Sycamore Gap tree was not typical of the ancient trees continually lost from the landscape. Sycamore is not a revered species in the same way as oak, beech or sweet chestnut, but this specimen was renowned for its place in popular culture (not least an appearance in the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves). While its destruction is clearly a great loss, scores if not hundreds of locally loved ancient trees are lost all of the time across the British Isles.

The Sycamore Gap tree. (Image: Getty Images)

So what are some examples from the last few years? Recently, six trees from the road in Northern Ireland known as Dark Hedges, famous for their appearance in Game of Thrones, were earmarked for felling because their branching structure was considered to pose serious risks to the considerable numbers of fans and other visitors who come to see them.

The interesting thing about these beech trees, perhaps the reason for their predicament, is the canopy structure in the form of low-cut pollards, called ‘coppards’ because the cut made hundreds of years ago was close to ground level where a coppice cut is traditionally made. Few standard beech trees make it past 150 years, but pollarding can add another one, two or even three centuries to a beech tree’s life. The Dark Hedges trees were planted around 1775. The trouble is, pollard beech trees like these end up several centuries of growth later with clusters of huge, bulky branches from a low position where the pollard cut was made. Load bearing is clearly considerable and presents a high risk of failure. A succession of storms has aggravated the problem, with trees damaged and brought down, most notably by Storm Arwen in November 2021 and Storm Isha in January 2024.

I was recently reading about a 700-year-old oak tree at Orpington in the London Borough of Bromley, taken down at the end of 2022 because the local council deemed the weight of its branches a ‘too dangerous a risk for local residents’. Pictures of the tree show it was a low-cut pollard and, like the beeches in Dark Hedges, bore half a dozen wide-diameter branches, coming out from a low position and spreading out to create a high load bearing. However, this tree was in the middle of large open space and, given its age, the council could have erected a high fence around it in line with the canopy extremity. While not internationally known like the Sycamore Gap tree or the beeches in Dark Hedges, its claim to fame was appearing in the John Lewis (department store) Christmas advert in 2020. The advert featured a young boy pondering how to dislodge his football, wedged between two of the tree’s thick branches. The locals were clearly not worried about the perceived danger because they created merry hell when council arb contractors took the tree down.

Wise men and women should think carefully before taking the axe to ancient English yew trees before they are cursed. That includes the author seen here with the Ankerwycke Yew on the Surrey/Berkshire border, which could be up to 2,500 years old. (Image: FJ/ TM)

Another locally revered ancient oak, with 550 years on the clock and some fame to its name, was sentenced to death in November 2023 by Shrewsbury Council because it is in the way of the Shrewsbury bypass. The tree is locally known as Darwin’s Oak because it grows very near to Charles Darwin’s childhood home (Mount House, Shrewsbury), with historians surmising how he may well have sat under the tree as a child in the early 1800s. It is said the countryside around his home inspired Darwin’s interest in the natural world. It is highly ironic then that Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ theory does not apply to this 550-year-old oak with a seven-metre circumference at breast height which, until the council stepped in, was clearly a survivor.

We haven’t even mentioned HS2 yet. Anyone who has visited Warwickshire knows how this county is famous for its veteran oaks and how many are at risk as HS2 scythes its way through famous old towns like Kenilworth and Leamington on its way to Birmingham. Sure enough, the locally famous 300-year-old Hunningham oak was knocked down back in 2020 to make way for this controversial railway. God knows how many oak trees have been felled to make way for HS2. Campaigners have apparently asked HS2 Ltd for a figure, but apparently even they don’t know.

Of course HS2 Ltd is completely non-discerning about species when a tree is deemed to be in the way, as evidenced by its removal of one of England’s most priceless specimens. Wild pear trees were once common across the country but are now one of the rarer British native tree species – and HS2 managed to dispatch one of the oldest and most valuable. The Cubbington Pear, which had been growing in a Warwickshire hedgerow for 250 years, was the second-largest wild pear tree in the country (3.78 m girth), voted England’s Tree of the Year in 2015. It was felled on 20 October 2020. Planted as a hedgerow tree for its fruit, the Cubbington Pear continued to bear sweet pear fruit right up until its bitter end.
Causing subsidence real or imagined is something else that can seal the fate of a tree, irrespective of age and provenance, and especially oak trees due to the extensive and deep-seated nature of the root system. A notable example succumbing to claims of subsidence was the 600-year-old Bretton Oak Tree at Ringwood, Bretton near Peterborough, felled on the orders of Peterborough Council. The irony is that these ancient oaks were there hundreds of years before the houses were built. Clearly more thought needs to go into planning new housing developments to ensure trees are far enough away not to pose a threat of subsidence in future. Without that, developers might as well be allowed to fell every tree in sight when houses are built.

The Hardy Ash had clearly experienced a precarious life, with roots having to thread their way between the tombstones. (Image: FJ)

Some famous trees are felled not by an axe or chainsaw but by a combination of old age and inclement weather conditions. One was Isaac Newton’s Apple Tree, a variety of Malus pumila called Flower of Kent, growing in Cambridge University Botanic Garden until it was sadly blown down by Storm Eunice in February 2022. It was actually a scion of the original tree which grew in the garden of Woolsthorpe Manor, near Grantham in Lincolnshire, said to have inspired Sir Isaac Newton to formulate his theory of gravity by watching the fall of an apple. The theory (without apples) was published in Newton’s Principia in 1687. Apple trees will very rarely live longer than 100 years, so it is not unreasonable to imagine the tree was nothing more than a scion of the original.

Since chalara ash dieback disease hit the UK in 2012, millions of ash trees must have been felled, but amongst this carnage was the loss of a very special ash growing in a North London churchyard. It was called the ‘Hardy Ash’ because it was claimed to have been planted by Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), famous English poet and author, but while he was engaged in something completely different to writing poetry and novels. His early years were spent as an assistant architect and in this role he was engaged in the construction of the Midland Railway. This necessitated disruption to the grounds of St Pancras Old Church in North London. Scores of headstones had to be removed and some of these were (as the story goes) stacked neatly around the tree. History claims this was carried out by Hardy. 

I have seen the tree, clearly something special, but I couldn’t believe the age assigned to it, if in fact it was there when Thomas Hardy arranged the headstones (if in fact he did). Construction of the London end of the Midland railway occurred in the 1860s which would have made the tree around 150 years old and near to or at the upper limit in age for an ash standard. There is no way that tree was 150 years old. Apart from anything else, the bark was insufficiently fissured.  

One of England’s two most famous English elms, the Preston Park Twins, 400-year-old pollards in Preston Park, Brighton, finally succumbed to Dutch elm disease some 50 years after the 1970s pandemic disposed of 25 million elm trees across the UK. (Image: FJ)

The tree collapsed on 27 December 2022, its root system apparently weakened by a fungal infection of the collar and root system – not chalara. I recall thinking to myself when I saw the tree how it was in a precarious position with a root system having to thread its way between countless gravestones on which is was essentially growing. Whether or not Thomas Hardy stacked the headstones in the 1860s, I believe the ash was generated by seed sometime after. Even though so many ash trees have been felled because of chalara, is it not strange that hardly any individual ash trees have been called out by name and age? That’s probably because ash, unlike oak, does not live to a grand old age and because until the advent of chalara, the tree was regarded as somewhat non-descript.

The UK’s 25 million tree population of English elm, including many thousands of very old trees, was all but wiped out in the 1970s by Dutch elm disease. However, one of the most famous contemporary English elms which survived recently succumbed and had to be felled. The tree was one of the ‘Preston Park Twins’, a pair of 400-year-old English elm pollards in Preston Park on the north side of Brighton in Sussex. It was felled in 2019.

One native tree not yet mentioned appears to escape the chainsaw whether at the hands of common-or-garden vandals or respectable ones in local authorities.

That is the English yew, which is able to match and indeed exceed the longevity of English oak. Irrespective of what type of vandal holds the chainsaw, deep in the medieval psyche is a fear of the Taxus baccata and the retribution that awaits the perpetrator. Not only are we managing to maintain our stock of ancient yews but we have complemented them with trees that were ancient yews 4,000 years ago when they died. This follows the work of a Cambridge University team of scientists who have been unearthing and dating remains of yew trees preserved in remarkably good condition and which grew in a forest which covered the Fens before they were inundated by sea water some 4,000 years ago.