IN a quiet corner of southern Dorset, hard by a wooded lane, there stands a seven-ton sycamore tree. Its canopy is green and its girth is thick, but its positioning is precarious.
This is because of the lane itself, which climbs between the little villages of North Chideock and Symondsbury. Over the centuries, countless individuals have travelled its length—traders, churchgoers, quarrymen, drovers—their feet and cartwheels gradually eroding the surface of the track, chewing away at the sandstone. The passage of wildlife and hundreds of years’ worth of rainfall have accelerated this process further. The result is that the ground level has sunk, increment by increment. In some places, the lane is a full 33ft lower than it once was. The sycamore now stands on the edge of a precipice.
The pathway, known as Shute’s Lane, is spectacular.
