Bridging the Gap

The felling of the Sycamore Gap tree on Hadrian’s Wall has had a huge amount of media attention, from the discovery of the crime on 28th September 2023, the morning after Storm Agnes, to last week’s conviction of two men for the criminal damage to the tree. It’s not at all a woodland tree, but I think there are some important rural issues that are part of the story but which the media have mostly glossed over.

First, it has to be said that the sycamore isn’t a native species, would never have been tolerated next to a military structure by the Romans, and would get you into legal trouble if you quietly planted one right next to a scheduled ancient monument today. But, what mattered wasn’t so much the tree itself as the picturesque silhouette it created in the dip in the ridge the Wall runs along. It made a fixed focal point for that length of wall, and many people set out to visit it, and even used it for proposals and scattering ashes. Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood even took a detour of hundreds of miles to visit it on the way from Dover to Nottingham – or maybe that was just the film crew!

Why did the two men fell such a tree? The prosecution, police, and media like the BBC have said it was a mindless act of vandalism, and pointed to the pair enjoying the immediate publicity the felling got. But when you scratch the surface, a lot more was going on. All too often criminal excesses by a handful of individuals are symptoms of wider frustrations, some of which are legitimate when expressed without violence or criminality.

It seems to have been the Telegraph that spotted the planning dispute that Dan Graham, the older of the two men, had with Cumberland Council. He had bought some land in 2015 west of Carlisle, 25 miles away from the Sycamore Gap. With permission, he put up a stables and turned his love of horses into some kind of business hiring carriages out for special events. He also did ground work and construction. He is not from a well off background and grew up in nearby Carlisle. He put a static caravan on the site, and after living there for about 6 years, he applied to the council for a certificate of lawful development. At the time, if you lived in a “dwellinghouse” for at least 4 years without permission or action from the council, the council could not then issue an enforcement notice to evict you. The council denied the certificate, saying that because the static caravan was not sufficiently attached to the ground, it counted as a temporary structure and the longer 10 year duration would have been needed. With this, Graham was and is facing eviction from his home. It’s likely that if he’d removed the static caravan’s little wheels from the start and set it in concrete to make it permanent, none of this would have happened.

We’re a country with a housing crisis and a housing shortage. Lots of people in the countryside who are just scraping by are denied the ancient right to live on their own land, which was removed in 1948. The vast majority of course don’t respond with criminal damage, and their cries for help are just ignored.

Even though Graham’s property was 25 miles from the Sycamore Gap, it was a few hundred metres from Hadrian’s Wall where he lived just west of Carlisle. This was brought up by the local parish council in its objections to his application for a certificate of lawful development, even though, as Cumberland Council noted, that process is a matter of fact and representations from parish councils must not be considered. Frankly, it’s not appropriate for them to try to influence council officers carrying out that process. The Wall was also brought up by Historic England in response to an application to replace a hay store, and to get it approved, Graham had to pay for a report about the hay store’s visual impact on visitors to the Wall.

Immediately after the crime, there was speculation that it might have been the result of a grudge against the National Trust who owned the Sycamore Gap (they are not a good landlord and are evicting tenant farmers to replace farms with rewilding projects, for example) or the Northumberland National Park (in Britain, the appointed national park authorities are in charge of the planning permission system instead of elected local councils). Both Trust and Parks are often accused of being run by people from cities who like to visit the countryside, to the detriment of the local people they have power over.

However, it now looks like Dan Graham’s dispute with his local parish council was the motive. It’s easy to imagine a man originally from a poor part of Carlisle, who is living alone, struggling financially, and facing eviction from his home, to harbour resentment towards a parish council chaired by, for example, a man from leafy Knutsford in Cheshire, where millionaire footballers live, who has come into the area with his mountaineering business, and had the money to snap up a listed building which would once have been a home for local people.

None of those motives in any way excused cutting down the tree. Most people just suffer in silence, which isn’t the answer either. We need to find ways of bridging the gap between town and country, that don’t involve treating the countryside as a colony to be ruled by the towns. Attacks on farming through inheritance taxes and sudden changes to promised environmental grant schemes don’t help. Relaxing planning laws to allow huge town extensions and solar farms on good agricultural land certainly isn’t helping, especially while our ancient right to live on the land we work remains suspended.

Having said that, I don’t think stopping people moving from towns into the countryside is the answer either. Newcomers bring capital, potentially their enthusiasm, and new ideas, and there have always been flows of people in both directions. In woodlands, about half of the acreage in England is unmanaged and so people buying up a bit and managing it themselves doesn’t significantly reduce what’s available for other people. For farms, there’s a shortage of land for young and would-be farmers, and so it does make a difference, but then again there’s a shortage of capital to invest too. When it comes to houses, if people from leafy Knutsford want to buy up houses in historic Cumberland, then fine. Just let people from Cumberland build homes too.