The Tree at the End of the World

The Sycamore Gap tree in Northumberland, England, was something of a local celebrity. It was made famous by Kevin Reynolds’s 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and named “English Tree of the Year” by the Woodland Trust in 2016. One of the most photographed trees in England, its aesthetic appeal owes much to its dramatic singularity: sitting in the bowl of two gently sloping hills, its wide, generous branches fan out across a shifting canvas of open sky. In addition to its striking composition, the lone giant seemed to speak across time: planted in the late 1880s, the centuries-old tree grew in a distinctive dip of Hadrian’s Wall, a nearly 2,000-year-old UNESCO World Heritage Site that marks the ancient frontier of the Roman Empire. In a time unmoored by incessant loss, unpredictable extremes, and epochal uncertainty, this enduring monument seemed connected to a more grounded sense of things, offering a point of orientation and assurance amid the intensifying turbulence of the present.