On the evening of 27 September 2023 I was driving from Newcastle to Carlisle in order to take out a group of German students the next day. As usual, my journey took me along the Military Road – the cross-country route created in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite Uprising – but, faced with atrocious weather, I dropped down on to the valley road and missed my last sight of the Sycamore Gap tree. I woke the next morning to emails asking me if I had heard the news of its felling.
I have to admit that my first reaction was: what is all the fuss about? I had walked past the tree many times over the preceding 50 years without giving it much consideration, but gradually it dawned on me that many people – very many people! – had a great affection for it, and that we archaeologists could offer them some comfort. There had been other ‘iconic’ views of the Wall that were favoured long before the sycamore had been made famous by Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (see CA 405), and in that spirit I contacted my publisher, Archaeopress, and around 40 colleagues. Thus was born Hadrian’s Wall in Our Time, with 80 contributions spanning recollections of frontier excavations, a cherished place or object, events, and individuals. It was an undeniable success – Archaeopress’ best-selling book of 2024 – but it soon occurred to me that, despite the event that had inspired it, we had not included much about the trees along Hadrian’s Wall. Another appeal for contributions went out, and 75 responses came together to form Hadrian’s Wall and Its Trees (see ‘Further reading’ below).
Protecting trees
The story of how Romans related to, and made use of, trees, has many branches. I will explore some of these themes here, but such is the diversity of this field that I hope that the other contributors to the book will forgive me for not including everything. In literature of the time (Andrew Fox writes), their engagement was sometimes purely practical: Pliny the Elder ranked trees according to their commercial viability, while other authors, including Cato and Columella, left us discussions of various species in farming manuals, and from Martial we learn that box hedges were used, as today, to mark boundaries. Some trees bore religious symbolism, and some were venerated in their own right, such as the cherry tree supposedly grown from Romulus’ spear which survived on the Palatine Hill in Rome for over 700 years, into the reign of Caligula (c.AD 40).
