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Hello,
It was National Poetry Day in the UK earlier this month and I couldn’t resist talking to Kate Fox about her new book, On Sycamore Gap, in an extra Book Club event. Kate’s book is about a very special tree in the north of England that was chopped down by vandals, but that has brought people together in the aftermath of its felling. You can read more the tree here, including the cheering news that new shoots have appeared from its trunk.
Below you’ll find the video of our conversation plus an extract and a poem by Kate, as well as a transcript if you prefer to read rather than watch/listen. Click ‘CC’ to add captions.
Extract and poem from On Sycamore Gap by Kate Fox
The tree's been cut down! When people were sharing the news, it often didn't even need to be said which tree it was. It was known by many names - the Robin Hood tree, the tree at Sycamore Gap, or just 'the tree on the wall!' But whatever name it went by, we all pictured the same tree in our mind's eye.
Like many people, I instantly flashed to a memory of when I had last visited. It had been during one of the pandemic winters, edging into spring. I was part of a constant line of North Easterners walking from the car park at Steel Rigg. Reassured by something beautiful that was still there, solid through the turbulent times, quiet, constant and with the promise of green shoots.
When I was asked to write about the tree for this book, I knew it had to be hopeful. Even as the unfathomable vandalism was still raw. It turns out that the hope isn't just in the new growth the tree and its cuttings are sprouting. But in the wider conversations that it is helping to spark. Conversations about conserving the habitat around the wall and everywhere else. About the urgency of this. About how communicative the networks of plant life are - something which is now understood more widely thanks to popular books like Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees and Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life.
It felt natural to tell a story of the tree in a form which echoes the oral storytelling songs and poems known as the Border Ballads, written in the area between the 1300s and 1600s, when stories of cross-border raids, rebellions and family feuds dram-atised the turbulent history of the boundary between England and Scotland where Hadrian's Wall and the tree stood. This 'trunk' of the sequence is interspersed with 'branches' in contrasting forms such as haiku, sonnets and a palindromic poem, showing the tree through the ages, and a chance for us to listen to the tree speak from a perspective deeper and wider than all the stories humans have given to it.
It is clear to me that the tree was a potent symbol of beauty, growth and love, in a time erying out for positive icons. By actively keeping on making meaning, memory and, yes, having those pilgrimages and picnies there, I hope we can let it still stand in our minds, as it once did in the earth, as a positive symbol - maybe even more valued than it was before.
In the land of far horizons where stonechat flit and curlews cry branches bare and branches green against a scudding sky.
Where a grey wall is living history where Romans and shepherds made their home where a reaching Empire rose and fell, where dolerite became limestone.
Where a town clerk planted a tree that would become famous everywhere, where walkers eat Kendal Mint Cake where the wind whipped Kevin Costner's hair.
It was a particularly shapely sycamore, growing sole and full tall
and for decades it was a local way marker known as the tree on the wall.
A hiker might rest against its trunk or touch their hand to its grainy bark, recognising a companion loner on the moor in the gathering dark.
We felt it had always been there, we thought that it always would,
as constant and changing as a Northern Star or the legend of Robin Hood.
To say There once was a - makes it sound like it has gone but this is the tale of a tree that was felled and still lives on.
In memories, stories and images that will keep on being unearthed in seedlings thriving under glass, in roots that can be rebirthed.
October’s Book Club
Our next Book Club pick is a classic: Hilary Mantel’s ‘Giving Up the Ghost’ (a Reading Guide is coming soon!), which I’ll be discussing with
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True Stories Book Club with Kate Fox