One cut. That's what it came down to — a single chainsaw pass through a trunk that had been putting on rings for somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and twenty years. It came down in the dark, in wind, in a dip on Hadrian's Wall that glacial meltwater cut long before anyone thought to plant anything in it. That was 2023.
The part that's actually field work happened afterward. Wardens back at the stump with clipboards through the following summer, counting shoots coming off the cut face and noting which ones held. Seed and twigs went off the ground that same week, and those have been grown on elsewhere, small things in pots. A sycamore doesn't care whether it was photographed. It coppices because that's what a sycamore does when you cut it. Slower than the tree was, and shorter, and not the same shape. But it's green.
That dip is where a lot of people first saw it without knowing the name — Kevin Costner's Robin Hood came through it in 1991, walking to Nottingham by way of Northumberland, which is geography nobody in my house questioned. A few seconds of screen time and then decades of people driving out to stand under it.
That dip is called Sycamore Gap for the tree, but the wall goes down through it and back up the other side, and somebody had to set those courses on a slope, dry, without mortar showing. Roman masons worked the crag as it came rather than cutting it flat. The stones are still sitting where they put them.