I was the Tree at Sycamore Gap

I was born in silence, a sapling barely taller than the heather, stretching toward the sky in a hollow between two hills - just where the land dips and the sky seems wider than it should. The wind found me first, singing through my branches before I even had leaves to catch it. The rain followed, soft and cold, soaking into the rocky soil around my roots. The sun was shy here, but when it came, it poured gold over the stones and helped me grow.

Behind me lay Hadrian’s Wall - a line of stone stretched across the land like a scar. The Romans built it, trying to mark the edge of something - an empire, a dream, maybe. They brought strange words and iron tools and built the wall to keep their fears on the other side. I was just an infant then, too small for them to notice. But I felt their footsteps. I listened to the soldiers who spoke languages long forgotten and sang quietly to themselves under the stars.

I grew slowly. Years passed like clouds drifting across the sky. People came and went, their stories brushing past me like wind through leaves.

A Roman soldier once leaned against my young trunk, still thin and soft. He sat with his back to the wall, whispering into the air. He said he missed figs and warm evenings. He never went home.

Long after the empire fell, another set of footsteps found me. A shepherd passed through with his flock, pausing in the dip of the land as he rested in my shade with his sheep at his feet. He sang to them, his voice rough but warm. His boots no longer kept out the rain, and his eyes held the weight of too many seasons. But when he looked at me, he smiled - as if he'd felt a connection.

Children came in every season. They scrambled over the wall and laughed when they reached me, calling me ‘The magic tree.’ One summer, they tied ribbons to my branches. Wishes. One wanted a dog. One wanted her mum to stop being sad. One just wanted to fly. I held onto those wishes as carefully as I could.

A boy once fell from my branches and broke his arm. He cried, but he forgave me. Years later, he returned, taller and wiser, with his own son by the hand. He lifted the boy into my lower branches and said with a smile, ‘This tree once taught me a very painful lesson – the ground fights back when you fall.’

A man once knelt beneath me on a bright spring morning, hands trembling as he held out a ring. The woman said yes before he could even finish his question. They came back every year on that same day, bringing a blanket and a picnic. I loved the sound of their laughter mixing with the wind.

There was a woman with silver hair who came every Tuesday with a sketchbook. She never spoke aloud, but I heard her thoughts. She sat for hours, drawing me again and again, sometimes with the wall behind me, sometimes just my branches. Once she cried while she sketched. Mostly, she laughed.

A woman scattered ashes at my roots and whispered, ‘You always loved this tree.’ Then she stayed a while, sitting quietly, as if waiting for him to join her. I held her silence as gently as I held her sorrow.

And then, the world changed again. People came with cameras. With phones. They posed in front of me, arms wide, backs to the wall. I became part of the view - famous even. I liked the quiet joy in their voices when they saw me. Some said I looked like something out of a storybook. Others just said, ‘Wow.’

I watched clouds pass over the valley. I watched the sun sink low, painting the land gold. I watched the moon rise and mist curl around my roots. I knew what it was to stay when everything else moved on.

And then, one night, I heard something I’d never heard before. The wind wasn’t singing. The stars were dim. The silence was too deep.

Men came, but they didn’t look up at me with wonder in their eyes. They didn’t sit in the grass or rest their backs against the wall. They were armed with a chainsaw.

The valley had known only whispers, only birdsong and wind. Until the roar of the metal. The blade bit deep, the wind did not answer. Trees don’t scream - not in a way you’d hear. But I screamed. In the deep rings of my body. In my roots, that remembered Roman hands and children’s wishes. They cut me down.

The earth that had held me up for so long trembled under my falling weight. Years, decades, centuries splayed in splinters and sawdust.

Morning came. People found me. Some knelt beside my stump. Some cried. Some stood very still, unsure of what to do. I had been there so long. And now I wasn’t. An icon destroyed in the dead of the night.

But an icon can rise again. All it needs is the will to fight. And I had that. Deep in the earth, my roots still reached. They remembered the stories and the secrets I had kept. They held the warmth of the sun, the shape of the wind, and the songs of birds. Even in the darkness, they remembered what it meant to be alive.

A whisper beneath the earth. A stir. A tremor of life, reaching towards the light.

A shoot – thin, green, brave.

People came again, this time with hope. They whispered, just maybe, I would rise.

I did.

I am not the tree you remember in the photograph. Not yet. But I am still listening. Still holding the stories you told me. I did not die when they cut me down.

I was the tree at Sycamore Gap.

I will rise again.