We were delighted when the Wigtown Book Festival invited our celebrant Angus Farquhar to lead a ceremony to remember and celebrate the life of the Sycamore Gap Tree which was deliberately cut down in September 2023. As he said, “A police investigation was launched and forensics officers were sent to take measurements and samples from the remains. One was heard saying: ‘In 31 years of forensics I’ve never examined a tree.’

 We are one year on from that heinous act. It was a deliberate act for which two people have now been charged, who will go to trial in December. And we might ask why the loss of one beautiful tree remains so poignant and elicits such a depth of anger, when millions of trees are lost annually across the world. The Sycamore Gap Tree, fulfilled a quite unique visual impact, a lone sentinel nestling protected in a natural dip of Hadrian’s Wall, a largely barren landscape holding an ancient living treasure that in its beauty summoned the sacredness of the wider universe; of life itself and our place and the place of all things within it.There are a few of these power places across Britain, common to Tibetan Buddhism or Japan’s Shinto traditions through which the manifold forms of nature form the basis for deep rooted ritual veneration.

So this one tree, with Sycamore one of the least revered of our common trees, reached far beyond its setting, quietly sustaining a continued emotional connection. The Sycamore Gap Tree, like all trees communicated this largely in silence, except in the movement of branches through wind, and did it through sheer presence.

As a celebrant I remember my first memorial service to a man Johnny who had a deep love of trees I described that he didn’t just live on the world, he lived in it, fully embodied within it, truth was imprinted in his hands and counted in broken bones; an elemental force to reckon with. It is that deep archetypal sense of being fully embodied in the world that we connect to when we encounter a great and ancient tree. If they were or are sentient beings then we would surely want to sit at their feet and hear what they have witnessed of life.

When taking a wedding I usually read a poem called the Rowan Tree, setting a tone for a wider world the ceremony inhabits, it starts

I was a rowan tree,

Plumed and infoliate,

High over Torridon,

Haunt of the Peregrine,

Giants encircled me,

Rock was my cradling,

Mine the Atlantic,

And all Caledonia.

Yet I realise the danger of memorialising this beautiful lost tree, is that we sentimentalise or romanticise our relationship and our anger at what to many felt like a truly disgusting act of desecration, truly unconscious incompetence, our anger at this revolting vandalism could turn to an apathetic moroseness, which does neither us nor the tree good service.

So in this light we might chart a passage from rage or head shaking  incomprehension to a different range of feelings or actions, so  we tonight have a range of readings, poems and thoughts this evening to set us on our way.

Thanks Angus, for showing how we can remain positive and active, not hopeless and listless in the face of environmental anomie.