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Weirdness
5 min read

The felled tree: decoding the destruction

The deliberate felling of an iconic tree is a story that author Theodore Brun had heard somewhere before, prompting him to explore the reactions to it further.

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles.

A felled decidious tree lies sprawled on the ground. The freshly sawn stump and roots are in the foreground
The stump of the felled sycamore tree.
Wandering wounder, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

News of the felling of the Sycamore Gap Tree was greeted across the country with shock, sadness and disgust. Shock at the wanton vandalism; sadness at the loss of an iconic feature of our British Isles; disgust at the kind of nihilism it must have taken in the mind of whoever did the deed. Predictably social media blew up. I blew up with it. This was ‘our’ tree - held which such affection by those of us who knew it across the nation as to be almost sacred. The spiteful disregard for that affection felt truly shocking.  

The most natural reaction to this is anger. “Throw the book at whoever did it!’ was the general feeling - whether it was the 16-year-old boy first arrested or the 60-year-old man detained later. No motive could justify such a mindless act.  

But then came the double shock for me. A jarring recollection that it was the story of the felling of another great tree that had been the seed of inspiration from which grew my entire historical fiction series, The Wanderer Chronicles. And in that story, the man doing the felling seemed to me something of a hero. The tree in question was a mighty oak, dedicated to Donar (better known as Thor) the god of thunder, which once stood in the province of Hesse in central Germany. In the early 8th century, an English missionary, known to history as St Boniface, took an axe to Donar’s Oak, a sacred place of worship to the local pagan inhabitants, even as a large crowd of them stood by raining curses on his head. Boniface would have justified his act of vandalism on religious grounds: the tree was the site of horrific human sacrifice and rituals of witchcraft, and must be destroyed, in part to prove the impotence of this pagan god.

Shocking as his act must have been, Boniface’s aim was not to offend. It was to overthrow. To overthrow a system of religious and spiritual oppression. A system of cruelty, death and bondage. In a sense, it was an act of expulsion of false gods who demanded everything and promised nothing in return. That would have been his justification, at least. And in its place, he intended to plant a new culture of faith, freedom and forgiveness; of truth and love. It’s telling that he used the timber from the fallen oak to build a church.  

The event marked the beginning of the widespread destruction of many sacred groves and other places of pagan worship in the decades that followed, symbolic of the supplanting of one pre-existing culture by another, more powerful culture on the rise.  

So, can Boniface’s good intentions be distinguished from the apparently nihilistic felling of the Sycamore Gap Tree in our own day? I think they can. But no doubt many would disagree. 

After all, these days, we find the idea of one culture asserting itself over another almost as abhorrent as the human sacrifice Boniface was trying to suppress. Certainly, to post-modern sensibilities and values, religious motivations no longer justify any kind of cultural vandalism. Few would have much sympathy for the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. Nor for the deliberate arson attacks in the mid-nineties on over fifty churches in Norway by neo-pagan Black Metal bands. Even today, the demolition of a Palestinian mosque by Israeli shells as an act of retaliation attracts media opprobrium, no matter the human death toll that provoked it. 

So, is there any good for which vandalism may be justified? 

In a world and culture that feel ever more divided, perhaps the Sycamore Gap Tree, even in its destruction, can give us some hope, some fleeting moment of cultural unity. 

The protest actions of environmental groups like Just Stop Oil or Extinction Rebellion fall into that vein, and strongly divide opinion. They proclaim a new gospel of environmentalism. Turn around, mend your ways, and be saved. (Although is it really just an old message of paganism: Appease the gods of sun and thunder or else face oblivion?) In any case, it’s a message burning with no less zeal than did old Boniface’s. And while they may not agree with their methods, many would at least agree with their cause and motive. The question is: how far can you stretch a point? 

The fact is that there is much that we do not agree on. Borders, taxation, healthcare, education, marriage, sex and gender, even what constitutes a human life. Cultural divisions seem to grow only wider. Increasing mistrust has us standing in opposition to one another - vitriol and disdain filling the space between us. Two tribes in a stand-off. Rather like the two hills that form the gap where that beautiful tree stood until last week. The gap is empty now. The tree is what brought them together. The tree was what completed the whole scene. Without it, we see only the empty air between the two opposing hills. 

In a world and culture that feel ever more divided, perhaps the Sycamore Gap Tree, even in its destruction, can give us some hope, some fleeting moment of cultural unity. Trees still represent to us an essential good. Their existence transcends the passage of our short lives. They stand through storm or shine. They sink their roots deep into the good earth. They stretch their limbs up to the skies. They are a metaphor for a life well lived.  

The felling of this iconic and beautiful tree is a pang we can all feel, the more so because it seems to have been done as a naked act of vandalism with - so far - no justification offered. Maybe this then is its greatest legacy: that, rather than reaching for the easy emotions of anger and blame, we can transcend our differences for just a moment. And allow ourselves to be reminded that, more than we ever realised, we loved that old tree. And we shall miss it now it’s gone. 

If we can all feel that, perhaps there’s hope for us yet. 

The Sycamore Gap Tree as was.

A black and white photo show a single mature tree silhouetted in the gap between two hills..
Article
Books
Culture
Sustainability
Wildness
7 min read

Wild writers for those who wish to wonder

A wilderness reader for wintertime and beyond

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Sheep around a frozen pond in a snowy landscape, a ruined cottage sits beyond.
Winter near Brno, Czechia.
Tomas Tuma on Unsplash.

We live in a time of decreasing biodiversity, reduced access to wilderness, and worsening mental health, and these things are, I think, linked. I wrote a bit about this recently. We are intimately tied to wilderness. We evolved on a diverse, living planet – not separate to it, but in it, dependent on it. It can be easy to forget this in part because we manipulate the world with lights and schedules and ideas of progress; we seal ourselves away in the walls of home, of work, of shops. Some of us live within the walls of church, too – disconnecting us from a wild God who increasingly to me seems most at home under the loud silence of the stars, and in the way the setting sun points to beauty before darkness, and in the way two people can bask in each other’s hearts. When I encounter love, and the loveliness of the world, I also encounter God.   

We are good at taking for granted the strange beauty of the planet. We are good at forgetting how to sit with wonder, how to even access it. The poetry of the Psalms tells us that “…they forgot what he had done, the wonders he had shown them...”  We must restore not only the living breathing wilderness of the planet we live in and on, but also our own ability to feel wonder, because this can be a first step towards feeling, caring, and acting.  

There are writers I turn to when I need to remember the diverse wildness and unlikeliness of our planet that is, as far as we so far know, an island of life in a cold and vast universe. When I read them, I wonder at our shared earth, at our hearts, and at the mysterious holiness of it all. Here then, some of those wild writers:  

Wendell Berry has influenced the way I interact with my locality, my faith, my responsibility to the earth I stand on. He is the author of essays, poetry, non-fiction and novels, but he is also a farmer in Kentucky. His preferred tools are a pencil and a team of work horses. For decades, his tending of both words and soil have each strengthened the other. His writing is rooted in the particularity of place, and through that, he speaks to the universality of our shared existence. His voice is incisive and honest, clear-eyed but full of a well-worn love. His call to a more localised and rooted way of life is not a call to escape, but to encounter – with beauty, with neighbour, with a spirit that breathes life through it all. In recent years, his writings have found new audiences. A good place to start, is The World Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry. It contains a selection of his essays written over decades – essays that call out ideas of endless progress and the unthinkingness that feeds it. From here, you might turn to other collections like The Unsettling of America, or The Art of the Commonplace. His poems are earthy and beautiful – look at The Peace of Wild Things And Other Poems. For fiction, his best-known works are Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter, rooted in the complexity of people and their community. At a time in which our planet burns faster than ever, his writing is prophetic and honest, yet braided with grace and love.  

The World Ending Fire is curated and has an introduction by Paul Kingsnorth: a writer I increasingly turn to. His story travels a path from environmental activism via explorations of various beliefs (including Wicca, Paganism, and Buddhism) to a recent – and unexpected to both him and many of his readers – conversion to Christianity. His journey is recounted in his essay, The Cross and the Machine. In his popular newsletter, The Abbey of Misrule, he writes essays that explore deep ecology, and ideas of a wild God, and of early Christian mystics who seemed much closer to the earth than many modern Christians do. His background in environmental activism still echoes – he cares for the world deeply, but his writing now, like his contemporary Dougald Hine, faces what might come when modern life as we know it becomes untenable. Like Berry, Kingsnorth brings an honesty to his writing that is often challenging to sit with. His collection of essays and talks, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, was key in my own journey. He also writes fiction, set in a strange, old England. And his short book Savage Gods, in his words, “…marks a break in my writing, my style and my worldview. This slim semi-memoir is one long question about the value of writing itself, and about what it means to belong, or not to.”  

Another writer of honesty and clarity is Marylinne Robinson. She is a social critic and novelist, perhaps Gilead being her most well-known book. Her latest book, Reading Genesis, is an interpretation of the book of Genesis. She takes words that are often interpreted in two-dimensional ways and makes them come alive. She speaks not just to the complexities of faith, but of what it is to be human in this world. Throughout her work more broadly, nature is a recurring theme, symbolising beauty but also fragility, and pointing to wonder and to our own inner state.  

The late and beloved Mary Oliver points to the luminosity of the world. Whether small creature or vast landscape, she invites us to slow down and really look. She insists again and again that we “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Often, her writing helps me to touch the interconnectedness of the living world, and of our humanity. Each fragment she shows us feels part of a larger whole she is also pointing to, and for which she regularly expresses gratitude, inviting the readers to consider “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” A good place to start is with Devotions, a collection of her most loved poems, or with Upstream, a mix of poetry and essays. Here, in the details of her daily walks and reflections, Oliver manages to conjure awe and a sense of the sacred.  

Another author who is extraordinarily attentive to the natural world is Annie Dillard. Her rapturous wonderings and explorations of world and place and self, link to deeper reflections, and often to the divine. Like Oliver, Dillard values specifics: “The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible fact about creation.” Dillard weaves her senses with her reading, and often her humour, zooming out and reminding us that “the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness.” Her 1975 Pulitzer prizewinning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is perhaps her best-known work, but a good place to start is Teaching a Stone to Talk; a slim collection of essays that begin with her observations of natural phenomena but end up encompassing the wilds of her mind and of its “ultimate concerns.”  

Poet, author, musician and playwright Joy Harjo was the first Native American to hold the position of Poet Laureate. She is a member of the Mvskoke Nation, and often explores themes of identity, history and social justice. Harjo weaves together past, present and future, linking our innate holiness with the natural world. A good place to start is the personal collection Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, or for an insight into her life, try Poet Warrior which brings together memoir, poetry and song, singing often of regeneration in the face of darkness.   

A few others you might naturally turn to from these authors include the late essayist Barry Lopez (his last remarkable collection published in 2022 is Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World), novelist and essayist Ursula K Le Guin (her Earthsea trilogy is fantasy but offers I think a profound reflection on who we are), and Robert Macfarlane, who writes thoughtfully of nature and myth, inner and outer landscape. And the old Psalmists tell of beauty and wonder: Psalm 104, in the New King James version, contains leviathans and rock badgers, lions and moons, trees and humans, all of it singing together the great song of life – a life that is precious, earthy and holy; a life woven by a God who we hear in Genesis say, “let us make mankind in our image, according to our likeness.” God is plural, as diverse as his creation. I am grateful for the writers, just a few of whom I’ve shared here, who help me to pay attention to the diverse and strange beauty of the world, and through that, help me see its luminous holiness. That holiness – wholeness – depends on all of us, all of creation, being able to be itself. As Mary Oliver says:  

“…Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, 
the world offers itself to your imagination, 
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – 
over and over announcing your place 
in the family of things.”