20 September 2011: I'm listening to BBC Radio York. A man climbs a tree in Irton, a village near Scarborough I've never heard of.
4 October 2011: I'm listening to BBC Radio York. They're broadcasting the sound of chainsaws: I'm crying about the felling of a tree I've never seen.
Most of the following was written in October 2011, but never made it onto the website then as I thought it was a bit long. It still is long.
But after I received David Parker's account of being a 'tree musketeer', I thought the following might complement/accompany his account. He was there, right in the thick of it, and I was miles away and viewing it all virtually, from afar.
I hope that this page is of interest as a record of modern-day 'remote campaigning' - which on the way inspired me to read old poetry, alongside 21st century tweets, and to think about speaking trees, as well as being followed by one.
On the morning of 20 September, I'm listening to local radio, hopping between that and Radio 4 and Radio 5Live, as usual. Radio York mentions a tree that villagers are trying to save. It's only a local matter, it's only a tree, but some mornings I'd rather hear about these details, the local things.
The reporter says that a man has just climbed up the tree. Something about checking for wildlife. A ladder has been produced, and he's gone up there, and he's staying there.
I'm listening more attentively now. This is much more interesting. It's clearly what we would call a 'spontaneous protest'. Not much seems spontaneous nowadays, and we are in North Yorkshire – not exactly a hotbed of direct action.
This is much more interesting. It's clearly what we would call a 'spontaneous protest'. Not much seems spontaneous nowadays, and we are in North Yorkshire – not exactly a hotbed of direct action
Imagination captured, I set about finding out more. To begin with, where is this place called Irton, near Scarborough?
Google can't find everything but I know from years of looking to it for answers that long-running wrangles like this will have generated a 'paper trail' of documents, even if you're not near enough to look at the actual paper.
Via 'Street view' I can see the tree in question. And a handsome thing it is too.
I set out on the virtual trail, and soon find PDFs and planning documents, and start reading. There's an issue with potential threats to drains and a wall from tree roots.
In our small garden we have had concerns about our drains being old and perhaps cracked. But I don't blame it on the nearby trees. And even if I did, I'd get the drains repaired instead of chopping trees down.
We have to check every now and then that the drains are working as they should, by peering down the inspection chamber in the garden. I realise that no one's done this for a while, and wonder if I should go and look down the drains.
That great line of Oscar Wilde's comes to mind: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars". I'd much prefer to think about higher things - stars, people up trees in spontaneous protest - than think about gutters and drains.
I start writing something, about trees, and drains. To illustrate it I already have many pictures of beech trees, as I'm always pointing my camera at trees, particularly beech trees in May. I've long been an admirer of the beauties of the beech tree. I don't have any pictures of drains.
22 September - We go for a wander through Moorlands Wood, near York. The wood is home to a venerable beech tree. I'm thinking it might cheer me up to see that splendid old tree, but it doesn't. The tree is now basically a stump, all its branches lopped off. I had thought that trees in woodland areas were safe from interference and mutiliation. Apparently not. Even if the land is managed by a recognised Wildlife Trust. Veteran trees in the middle of a woodland aren't safe, if they're anywhere near a path that someone might walk down.
23 September - I write a card to the Irton tree supporters. I like the idea of it being delivered to the tree. I don't believe anything without a postcode will have a chance of arriving, in our 21st century age, so use the postcode of the nearby house. I check what I've written to see if I'd mind it being delivered to the nearby house. I jump on the bike and cycle to the sorting office to make the day's last collection.
24 September - 28 September - compile more pages for the website, finding more documents online, hearing more coverage on Radio York.
Rather magical is the changeover of protestors up the tree, as each one leaves and another replaces them. Whatever organisation has gone on behind the scenes to arrange this apparently seamless transfer, I'm far away and unaware of it, and from here it seems as if one spontaneous act after another is protecting this tree from being felled. This is the most cheering and inspiring thing I've seen for a long while.
My entire experience of this magical faraway tree is coming to me via modern media - the internet - and media a little older - the radio. I've seen it only via Google maps 'Street View' and photographs posted online.
There's a fair distance between me and the people who are sitting in the tree's branches, yet in the virtual realm there's no distance at all, for those who care about the same thing. We're all neighbours.
Many people across the country are posting messages online since the Irton tree has been featured in the Mail and The Independent. And of course covered in most detail by the local paper, the Scarborough Evening News. Which I'm able to read online.
29 September - The Irton Tree is now tweeting.
Having previously resisted owing to fears of information overload, I now have to join Twitter, even though I doubt I'll tweet much. Can't miss the opportunity of being followed by a tree.
This website gets twice as many visitors as usual. I've found my Irton-tree-inspired page is the main link in the @IrtonTree Twitter profile, and has been quoted in The Northerner Blog.
This attention feels a little undeserved. I'm not up the tree, or sitting by it on a nightly vigil. I haven't even see it in 'real life'. My entire experience has been a 'virtual' knowing, a finding and reading of reports, a compiling of web pages in response to what I've found online, exchanges via email, listening to Radio York.
Over in Irton they're gathering beechnuts, the tree's seed, to ensure it can live on in some form. Over here in York I'm gathering information and links into website pages, as the internet searching has borne its own kind of fruit, which needs planting in the right place - back on the internet.
The weather has been kind, warm and sunny, and through tweets and photos I've already formed a touching picture of the scene around the Irton tree.
This day sees more frenetic tweeting activity, including some rather plaintive tweets, as news of a court decision is due soon. In a moment of calm and waiting, the tree tweets:
"It looks like my 2012 beechnuts will make that new verse for Scarborough Fair. People are gathering my Beechnuts, I will survive."
I have to confess that this makes me cry. I wonder if anyone else has ever cried over a tweet from a tree. I wonder if in future people will study particularly poignant and poetic tweets like this one in English Literature classes. Whoever is writing the messages is skilfully conveying the tree's loftiness, and its 'looking down'. Reading the tweets, I pictured the scene not from ground level but from up in the branches.
The decision is due to be announced at around 4pm. I escape for a quick cycle ride up the road out of town, where several venerable beech trees - much older than the Irton one - are still standing. I was impressed by their vastness and beauty when I first saw them. More impressed now, having begun to appreciate the many threats our old trees face.
I cycle back, and tune in again to Radio York, to hear the man from NYCC read his statement.
Sentence is passed - the tree will be felled, sometime after the weekend.
How depressing.
I've heard that David Hockney is also against the tree-felling. The thought occurs that he might be a sixth protestor to climb up the tree, at the last minute. But I doubt it. This isn't a film.
Not yet anyway.
Radio can of course be so much more powerful than TV. Most prominent in the Radio York broadcast of the decision is a kind of tapping, in the background, while the spokesman reads the statement.
It sounds like someone is hammering the official notice to the trunk of the tree. 'He's not!' I exclaim indignantly to an empty kitchen, talking to the radio.
It doesn't seem right, in the 21st century - it's a bit medieval. I wonder if he'll also be wandering along the road and nailing the notice to the nearest church door.
The spokesman is being recorded by all manner of hi-tech equipment - cameras and microphones, and no doubt smart phones - and in the background is the tap tap tap of old-fashioned nails going into a hundred-year-old tree. You'd have thought they'd have some string, or a cable tie or something, like when they attach site notices to lamp posts. The hammering sounds deliberate, a bit vindictive.
Filling in the image the sounds suggest, I can imagine the crowd gathered to hear the judgement, watching the star of this particular act read his statement, and the man in the background wandering up to the tree with his nails and hammer, attaching the official notice to the 'main character' in this long-running drama.
It reminds me of the York Mystery Plays, which I've seen performed a few times in recent years, on waggons in the streets of York. Specifically, the depiction of the crucifixion, the way they bang the nails in.
These thoughts are perhaps sacriligious. Apologies for any offence. Blame the chap banging the nails in.
Though these thoughts then lead me to remembering something studied at university more than twenty years ago, an old English poem, dating from the 8th century, one of the earliest Christian poems.
The 'Rood' is the cross on which Christ was crucified, and in the 'dream' of the poem it speaks. Even if you're not a believer, it's an astounding piece of writing for its time, indeed for any time. The cross remembers being a tree, cut down in the forest, and it speaks of the trauma of its felling, and the far greater trauma of its role in the crucifixion. The tree, and Christ, stand firm and brave and accept their fate.
There are many ways of reading it, but one of the most interesting angles is to see it as a way of combining the ancient veneration of nature with the most powerful Christian symbol of Christ on the cross. The tree and Christ become one as the nails are banged in through flesh to wood.
They pierced me with dark nails;
The scars can still be clearly seen on me,
The open wounds of malice. Yet might I
Not harm them. They reviled us both together.
Many centuries ago a writer made a tree 'speak' its own experience, and combined Christian and pre-Christian belief. Other poets in later centuries have made trees 'speak'. In Brian Fairfax's 17th century poem, oak trees recount their memories, and lament the loss of a bygone golden age when they were safe and protected. In a later poem by Thomas Campbell, a beech tree makes an emotive appeal to the looming axeman.
In that same tradition, but in a 21st century way, came the Irton tree tweeting on Twitter. Genius.
The email alert arrives: "Irton Beech Tree (@IrtonTree) is now following you on Twitter!"
Worth joining the endless information stream of Twitter just for that - being followed by a tree. Like something from Lord of the Rings.
I'm sitting in our kitchen in York. Radio York broadcasts the sound of chainsaws. Chainsaws cutting through healthy wood, lopping off inconvenient branches, mutilating. I feel like I'm listening to some huge old creature being brought down. It's revolting.
I'm crying not because I think trees feel, but because we do.
And because killing healthy mature trees is wrong. Just wrong. It's a terrible error of judgement to fell a community's tree for the sake of the people in one house.
As the tree comes down, it's like it's some kind of sacrifice. To our new god - fear of litigation.
Dream of the Rood - Wikipedia
It was years ago, or so I remember,
that I was torn from the trees' edge,
ripped from my root
- translation by Mark Leech, with original Anglo-Saxon text alongside, on www.stephen-spender.org.
The Dream of the Rood - translation by Richard Hamer (from which the extract in my text above was taken)
This page was originally written in October 2011, edited & published in January 2012.
Send any rude messages to getalifeyoutreehugger@yorkstories.co.uk.