Scientists have for the first time confirmed the age of the felled Sycamore Gap tree, adding weight to a theory that it was planted in the late 19th century by a landowner hailed as “the man who saved Hadrian’s Wall”.
Historic England published the conclusion of an investigation by a team of experts who carried out the first dendrochronological – or tree-ring counting – analysis of the tree.
The evidence suggests the tree was at least 100-120 years old when it was felled, and almost certainly older, probably appearing in the landscape in the late 19th century or earlier.
That would tie in with a belief held by the National Trust and others that the tree was planted in the 19th century by the philanthropic, forward-thinking landowner John Clayton.
The Sycamore Gap tree stood at a beauty spot on Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland that was the site of countless marriage proposals, birthday celebrations and scatterings of ashes.
Its illegal felling prompted sadness and anger that rippled around the world. Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers, the men who cut the tree down on a stormy September night in 2023, were each jailed for four years and three months.
Tom Frater, a regional director at Historic England, said there was a continuing fascination with the tree. “I think people had a real sense of it being an old feature in the landscape but you don’t know, you can’t know just by looking at it when it’s living, and the historical records give us clues but only so much.”
The operation to age the tree involved cutting a slice from the bottom end of the felled trunk. This was wrapped and transported to Historic England’s national science facility in Portsmouth, a set of laboratories on the site of an 18th-century fort where research into some of the nation’s most significant heritage sites has taken place for 75 years.
The task this time was counting rings on a tree, but that was not as straightforward as it might sound, Frater said. “There is a lot more to it in practice. When you are looking at a tree of this age, the rings are incredibly close together and you need to treat it very carefully in laboratory conditions.”
There were “anomalies and splits” in the rings that made the job more challenging, he said. Also, the ring boundaries of sycamores are less obviously defined than in some other tree species.
The conclusion is that the tree is a minimum of 100-120 years old but because the analysed section was a metre off the ground, the tree must be older.
“The oldest rings representing the very first years of the tree’s life would be represented lower down the tree, in the base of the trunk, suggesting it was first planted in the late 19th century,” Historic England said.
The most widely believed origin story is that the tree was planted as a landscape feature on the instructions of Clayton, the town clerk of Newcastle, who owned lots of land around Hadrian’s Wall. He had the vision to see what the sycamore tree might become after his death, the theory goes.
Clayton is remembered as a true hero of the wall, recognising the need to excavate and protect. Whenever land around the wall came up for sale, he would try to buy it. English Heritage has called him the “man who saved Hadrian’s Wall”.
Clayton died in 1890, so the new research, while not conclusively confirming the theory, is consistent with it being true, Frater said.
