Our village sycamore

Val is prompted to find out more about local sycamores

- Val Bourne

I MUST walk past our village sycamore tree, planted in the middle of our small village green, once a day, and yet I have never given it a second thought. Well, that is, not until the Father Brown actor Mark Williams asked me about it. He told me that several local villages had veteran sycamores planted in key positions and he wondered why. He’s a very bookish man, so I was loath to admit my ignorance on the matter!

That evening the Best Beloved went and measured the girth of the village sycamore, which was 5.5m (18ft). The measurement allows you to calculate its age. If you measure the girth in centimetres, 1m from the ground, and divide by 2.5cm (the average growth rate per year) you can calculate the rough age of any tree. Our sycamore was planted between 1750 and 1800, when George II or George III was on the throne.