It’s a Devil of a Gap
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When I was a child Sycamore Gap was a place you would go to if you wanted to read shadows. Back in the eighties and nineties, a time before sprawling tourist centres and well-worn walking routes, the land between the Roman forts at Housesteads and Carvoran was about as remote as it was possible to get in otherwise populous England. In my head, then as now, it was an overcast dreamworld. And probably in some sense it was the North’s unconscious too – a grey hinterland filled with the ghosts of Tungrian soldiers and gibbeted outlaws, the thrumming, quiet air of a wilderness, the sudden cresting of the Whin Sill into crags like disembowelled dinosaurs.
In the thick of all this I remember the Tree as it was. A dark spindle slanting into view on car journeys along the Military Road. Is it this dip in the wall, or the next? There it is. Sometimes we would walk to it from the car park at Steel Rigg, taking visiting friends to see the Robin Hood Tree, so called after its role in 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. We’d flaunt our local cred by fact-checking the film as we walked, telling them how the Moorish character Azeem (played by Morgan Freeman) is tricked by Kevin Costner’s Robin into pointing his prayer mat towards Carlisle and the West. ‘Is there no sun in this cursèd country?’ Azeem sighs, searching late in the day for an astral coordinate for Mecca. Well, no, there isn’t. At least, not very often.
If we are to believe the DVD commentary later appended to Prince of Thieves, Costner and his production team decided on location to channel the surreal spirit of the Wall Country by devouring a specimen of its terroir: the psilocybe semilanceata, or common magic mushroom. What they got up to on these psychedelic adventures is not described. But whatever their effects, there is no doubt that the mushies are a very weird meal for a very weird place. Or perhaps the more fitting word is eerie. With or without chemical aid, the eeriness of the land around Sycamore Gap can be fairly easily felt by anyone who ventures there outside of the few, ambiguously sunlit summer months. As the cultural theorist Mark Fisher once pointed out, the eerie is a phenomenon that typically takes root in ‘landscapes partially emptied of the human’. More than this, argues Fisher, pointing beyond psychogeographic spook, if we have any intellectual curiosity at all we are likely to think that an eerie landscape poses a series of fundamental questions about its social and political contexts: ‘What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance? What kind of entity was involved? What kind of agent is acting here?’
Sycamore Gap is one of the eeriest, most inscrutable, most literally inhuman sites in all of modern Britain.
The contexts of Sycamore Gap and its surroundings are many and layered. Foremost among them is a long history of wrangles over land ownership – the abiding English nightmare. Indeed, it is ownership disputes, more than anything else, that moulded the contours of this terrain. In the Roman period this was a heavily militarised zone, a place where elaborate walled defences spoke not so much of the strength of a brutal Roman occupation but of its fragility in this part of Britannia (hence the ultimate desertion and decay of the Wall after the Empire crumbled).
Much later, after the Normans and their heirs had often vainly tried to subdue the locals from their castles, it became a martial frontier once again, a debatable land where reivers and rustlers hacked makeshift bastles out of the forts and slaughter was common in the fields. More recently, as the modern English countryside emerged from centuries of enclosure and clearance, the Wall Country evolved into a patchwork of aristocratic estates, pastures kept by wealthy farmers and their tenants and, ultimately, heritage land maintained by bodies like the National Trust, English Heritage and Northumberland National Park. While the nobility maintained barren moorland for the sake of grouse-killing jaunts, and farmers allowed their livestock to eat and trample the fields, the heritage bodies had the worthier aim of protecting the Wall after centuries when it had been ploughed and pilfered by archaeologically indifferent farmers and landowners. But crucially, what united all these interests was the desire to keep this corner of the country isolated to some degree – that is, aside from a small-ish quota of transient visitors, mostly emptied of the human.
This, then, is what created the unusually picturesque backdrop that put Sycamore Gap on the map and in a prime spot on countless guidebooks, watercolours, websites and tourist trinkets. The solitary Tree as a symbol of nature and vitality triumphing over rubble and decline, and poignant largely because of its solitude, because it was pretty much the only really vigorous sign of life for miles around.
It is also, ironically, what seems to have led to the downfall and possible permanent destruction of the Tree itself in the early hours of the 28 September 2023. Despite the findings of a long 2025 court case, it remains difficult to work out the nuances of – and the incentives behind – this unorthodox crime. Perhaps the two men who felled the Tree – Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers, both classic ‘Border Reiver’ names – were merely bored, or slightly mad in some sense of the term. But whatever their deeper motivations, the fact that they were first compelled to do something like this, then able to chainsaw to the ground a huge regional landmark, getting to and from the scene with heavy machinery and lighting, all while remaining apparently unobserved, is proof beyond doubt that Sycamore Gap is one of the eeriest, most inscrutable, most literally inhuman sites in all of modern Britain.
What happened – we might ask, following Mark Fisher – to produce this spectacular disappearance, beyond the immediate rather puzzling circumstances of the case? Perhaps our present difficulty in working out exactly what happened to the Tree (not to mention stopping it from being destroyed) is because it was just an unfortunate local mishap. On the other hand, if we think cultural symbolism means anything at all, we might also suggest that the narrative of Sycamore Gap embodies something broader and deeper in the surrounding totality. Might there be something, beyond backwater nihilism, in the vanishing of the Tree at Sycamore Gap that speaks to us about a country increasingly unable to protect its social and civic structures in the most basic ways – a country that is now, as the economists and social analysts warn, in real danger of slipping back into cycles of decline?
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Human beings have indulged in notions of social disintegration since the beginning of recorded history, of course, and no doubt long before then. But in a modern British context, aptly enough, the meaning of social decline is unavoidably bound up with the downfall of imperial Rome and its real and imagined cultural legacy. Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – a biblically ubiquitous presence on British bookshelves for almost two centuries after its serial publication between 1776 and 1789 – is partly to blame. Among other things, Gibbon’s book took the standard Enlightenment notion of a Renaissance-like revival of the classics (after their apparent suppression in the Middle Ages) and gave it sturdy British grounding, helping to turn Roman-inspired neoclassicism into a fashionable project for the go-getting middle-class in the long nineteenth century.
It’s hard not to conclude that the fate of Sycamore Gap parallels that of post-1930s Britain more generally.
Throughout the Georgian and Victorian years, the implicitly Gibbonite idea that the Roman cause might be revived in an age of industry and renewed imperialism was a central driving force in the cultural life of the English bourgeoisie. This was perhaps especially true in the North East of England, where the close proximity of Hadrian’s Wall – Britain’s largest and most visible Roman ruin – to one of the most energetic centres of the industrial revolution was a coincidence too perfect not to have resulted in some major cultural paroxysms. One of these was the life and civic works of John Clayton, a wealthy solicitor and eventually town clerk of Newcastle, who in a sense created the version of Hadrian’s Wall we apprehend today.
From his stately home at Chesters, a mile or so north of my childhood home in Fourstones on the edge of the Wall Country, Clayton embarked on the twin projects for which he is best known, each propelled by a spirit of passionate Roman revivalism. In the centre of Newcastle, Clayton collaborated with the architect John Dobson and the builder Richard Grainger to create a matrix of elegant new streets (notably Grey Street, Grainger Street and Clayton Street), which drastically transformed the topography of the city in the 1820s and 1830s. Partly due to Clayton’s influence, the developments of what would later be called Grainger Town elaborated a rugged, repetitious architectural style (termed ‘Tyneside classicism’ by some) that was fairly obviously indebted to the patterns in the ruins of the surrounding Wall Country just as much as it was to Palladio and Robert Adam. Meanwhile, in and around Chesters itself (an estate built on the remains of a Roman cavalry fort), Clayton worked hard to establish a conservationist approach to the Wall after a long millennium when it had been progressively dismantled by local farmers and builders. Whenever a stretch of the Wall Country came up for sale, Clayton would buy it and attempt to preserve or reconstruct the remains he found there, often relocating farmhouses away from the Wall to protect it from future disturbance. Because it lay on relatively high ground, the stretch of the Wall between Housesteads and Carvoran had escaped one of the most destructive periods of redevelopment, when General George Wade replaced large tracts of the eastern half of the Wall with a new ‘Military Road’ after the Jacobite campaigns of the mid-eighteenth century.
Clayton’s preservation efforts helped to ensure that the craggy section of the Wall passed over by Wade would become a major site of archaeological interest – and, eventually, a popular tourist destination. It was also Clayton – according to the National Trust, which now maintains the ruins he saved from permanent destruction – who at some point in the late nineteenth century decided to plant a sycamore tree on the Wall between Steel Rigg and Crag Lough, in order, so they say, to create a feature of the landscape.
The rise of the Tree at Sycamore Gap was part of a long process that saw nineteenth-century Roman-inspired civic philanthropy – a broadly Gibbonite campaign to enliven Britain on classical lines – develop into something more resembling contemporary conservation movements. A crucial point here, in terms of the real and imagined recent history of decline, is that while nineteenth-century industrial capitalism had in a sense given birth to the Tree (and for that matter to the civic heart of Newcastle), it was only really the legislative culture of the twentieth century that gave sites like Sycamore Gap a fighting chance of survival in the long term – and indeed prevented them from being destroyed by less scrupulous capitalists than John Clayton.
In the 1930s, the classic stretch of Wall Country was threatened with destruction by the Darlington businessman John Wake, who planned to extract two hundred thousand tons of whinstone from the land around Sycamore Gap for his company ‘Roman Stones Limited’. The organised response at national level – which rumbled on for the next four decades – was a series of interventions by the National Trust and the British state in the form of successive conservationist Ministries (eventually morphing into English Heritage), which finally managed to safeguard the Wall with the aid of several government acts and orders pertaining to ancient monuments. The net result of all this was that – by the 1970s at the latest – Sycamore Gap and its Tree seemed to be safe forever.
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Looking before and after this point it’s hard not to conclude that the fate of Sycamore Gap parallels that of post-1930s Britain more generally. In the first phase of this period, the run-up to the late 1970s, the safeguarding of the Wall was achieved in a country increasingly dominated by social protectionism and the statutory empowerment of the British public to encounter their landscape and its heritage in mutually supportive ways. If there is a lesson to be gleaned from all this, it has something to do with how we handle the social and political inheritance of these years. While the mid-to-late twentieth century is often regarded as the nadir of Britain’s ‘decline’ after the collapse of its own empire, the record of how Hadrian’s Wall was legislatively preserved in the post-war period is a good example of how, in most of the ways that matter, this was in fact a time of sustained improvement of the nation’s civic and social fabric.
Perhaps both decline and renaissance are too sweeping to be of any use to us as frameworks for understanding the piecemeal chaos of human experience.
On the other hand, the years since the late seventies have witnessed the rise of a politics of deregulation and diminution of state (and often public) influence that has been fairly open in its disregard for social structures as such. At the same time as we should be sceptical about conservative myths of a post-war national collapse, we might also consider that the half-century or so since Thatcher’s ‘no such thing as society’ creed was announced could in fact be viewed as the real period of national decline. Indeed, if we take Thatcher’s dictum literally, the purpose of the post-Thatcher political consensus has been to radically privilege individuals and their families at the expense of society per se. In other words, social disintegration was the whole point of Thatcherism and its later ramifications.
Looking at the narrative of Sycamore Gap, and at the social landscape of modern Britain more broadly, it is easy to see confirmation of this flipped understanding of what might be called living memory. From a consistent lack of investment by post-eighties British governments in transport infrastructure (which literally brings people closer together), to the more recent devastation of health and care services wrought by 2010s austerity, the defining movement of recent British history has been towards the aggressive destruction of the social tissue that connects individuals and their families to larger communitarian units. It is this neglected or ruined civic architecture, more than anything else, that might have had the potential to protect people in situations such as property evictions or mental health crises – paradigmatic cases in which neither individuals nor their families are able to rescue themselves through the sheer heroic self-reliance recommended by Thatcherite ideologues.
It is against this backdrop that we find ourselves living in an age of pronounced self-centredness and aloneness – an age, we might say, of radical eeriness. Ours is an epoch everywhere defined by the malevolent acts of rogue individuals on the one hand (from local all the way up to prime ministerial level), and on the other by the sad, often silent dwindling of the lonely and isolated into black holes of anxiety, depression and much worse. In other words, while it might not have anything at all to do with right wing bogeys like immigration, there is little doubt that right now we are living in a time when, to invoke a Roman commonplace, the barbarians are at the gate. More prosaically, we surely have to accept that the age we are passing through is one of palpable social decline, and in doing so take the first step towards working out how to move beyond it, by rebuilding the social structures lying ruined all around us.
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The first time I saw Sycamore Gap after the felling of the Tree I felt a strange kind of hollowness. It was late November 2023, and I had driven to the Wall Country with my youngest son Jack for something to do while I looked after him on paternity leave. Nothing like the grey, overcast landscape of my unconscious, the fields and moors that surrounded the Military Road were now covered in a thin layer of white marking the onset of a dry early winter. The sky was a bright, Mediterranean blue. I felt happy in the present.
After driving along the Military Road for a while, we stopped at Twice Brewed for a lunch of cake and beans-on-toast in the café of the slick new tourist centre The Sill. It was at this point that in spite of everything I started to feel a creeping sense of mild optimism as I thought about the twists of fate that had brought me and my son to this crossroads in time. As I cradled Jack on my lap, slowly shovelling lukewarm beans into his (for once) receptive mouth, and as I looked out at the Wall through a neo-modernist window, I was tempted to go further and think that perhaps the twenty-first century might not be so bad after all. Perhaps both decline and renaissance are too sweeping to be of any use to us as frameworks for understanding the piecemeal chaos of human experience. Indeed, as the existence of The Sill seemed to prove, despite Thatcherism, austerity, Covid, plummeting birth rates and multiple other socio-economic maladies of the last few decades, there were some stray things that seemed to be getting built – and just maybe getting better – in modern Britain.
I remembered coming to Twice Brewed as a child in the early nineties for gatherings of the Wall Country primary schools organised by Northumberland National Park rangers, which climaxed with mass open-air ‘Romans vs Barbarians’ sponge fights for want of anything better to do. So too, from roughly the same period, came memories of climbing to the mouldering upstairs function room of the Twice Brewed Inn (now a bustling, gastro-ish microbrewery) to see moustachioed magicians in the old northern tradition perform tired rabbit tricks at birthday parties on rainy winter Sunday afternoons. It was hard not to compare that time with now, and to at least consider that there might be something good about the transformation of the Wall Country – and indeed Britain as a whole – from a place of slightly dilapidated and often rather meagre leisure facilities, to a remodelled land full of varied, easily accessible, often rather pleasurable consumer choice. To reduce all this to the most mundane level, for all my deep reservations about the British present tense, I had to admit to myself that the artisan almond cake I was eating tasted pretty good – and perhaps, by extension, that the Wall Country might have been modernised in at least some positive ways over the last three decades.
As I caught sight after a while of the now empty dip in the Wall at Sycamore Gap, I felt something close to absolutely nothing.
Then again, trusting in the fleeting epicureanism of the service economy will only get you so far – which is to say, not very far at all. Even as I felt grateful for the good fortune that had granted my baby son and me this day of bright skies and nice food, I was also aware that our happiness depended almost entirely on a particular combination of blind endurance, privilege and opportune choices that had somehow come together to guarantee a hermetic kind of prosperity for our isolated family unit – for the time being at least. Meanwhile, outside of our car, hurtling through a countryside full of fortress-like farms and barn conversions barricaded with the spoils of boomer affluence, it was clear that west Northumberland was – like the nation as a whole – a place in which individualism and social withdrawal ruled imperiously over everything in sight.
In fact, at the risk of stating the obvious, this had very little to do with the Tree itself – a classic empty signifier if ever there was one. To be quite honest, notwithstanding its status as a collective symbol and a natural entity worthy of respect, I couldn’t actually have cared less about it. This was, at least, the mildly shocking emotion I felt on encountering the site of its destruction on this clear winter’s day a couple of months after the event. While I had expected to feel some sense of loss – had indeed planned this day trip to the Wall Country partly in order to say goodbye to this totem of my childhood – as I drove my son back along the Military Road after lunch, and as I caught sight after a while of the now empty dip in the Wall at Sycamore Gap, I felt something close to absolutely nothing. The Tree was after all – it seems almost absurd to say it – just a tree.
When we got to Newbrough, the next village along from Fourstones, I lifted Jack out of the car and carried him through the graveyard of St Peter’s Church (another building perched on the ruins of a Roman fort), where most of the people who lived and died in the parish are now buried. Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy’ said much of what there is to say about these places in dark counterpoint to the eighteenth century of Gibbon and classical revival. But on top of the timeworn, commonplace poetic emotions, as I scanned the headstones in the churchyard I couldn’t help but also feel a sense of desperation at how many of the adults who loomed large in my childhood – especially and perhaps tellingly the women – seemed to have died much earlier than they should have done: in their sixties, their fifties, sometimes even earlier (though also pithily, the local squire’s wife I remembered from village fêtes, a great-great-niece of John Clayton, seemed to have survived into octogenarian old age).
Perhaps this is simply the sort of thing that happens when you are heading for forty – as I then was – as the scales start to tip against you, and you feel the weight of the dead winning out over the lightness of the living. But I also felt strongly once again that there was something profoundly eerie – in the literal, Fisherian sense – about the inability of so many of the adults in this parish on the edge of the Wall Country not to disappear before their time. As with the Tree at Sycamore Gap, maybe this was simply a case of just so many accidents and incidents. But you’d also have to say that surely, in at least some of these cases, a more nurturing, less isolating society would have had a mollifying effect on the lives of these people, might even have ensured that some of them were given slightly longer to enjoy the rise and fall of this unsteady, beautiful earth.
After wandering around for a while, I took Jack to see my parents’ grave. Through the usual mist of mild tears, I read aloud to him the family motto my sister and I had chosen for its headstone in the distant, disordered days of the mid-noughties, when we first felt the radical aloneness of modern Britain in all its inhuman depth. And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make. Having got everything we came for, we made our way back through the churchyard, clambered into the car and drove on to the city and home.
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Alex Niven is an editor at Alameda and the author of books including The North Will Rise Again.
Cover image: Clementp.fr, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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