The Leaning Larch of Roseberry Common

A tree of little grandeur—stunted, battered, and twisted by all that the North York Moors can throw at it—leans, barely upright, on Roseberry Common, straining its gnarled branches towards Easby Moor, where the monument to Capt. James Cook RN stands.

This, let us say, “larch” — and I am sure some arborist will leap to correct me — exudes an air of stoic isolation, grows defiantly on the col. True, this solitary tree has become something of a photographic darling, with Roseberry Topping grandly behind it, but it will never achieve the tragic celebrity of that recently felled sycamore by Hadrian’s Wall.

The tree’s misshapen form speaks of a life harried on all sides by wind, sun, soil, animals, and maybe the passing walker. If one cares to delve into the jargon, the scientific reason for its hunched, twisted state is “thigmomorphogenesis”—a word I have long waited to use in a post and one that explains, rather drily, why a tree stunted by its hardships doesn’t grow as grandly as its luckier cousins. After wind, water is the other major culprit: dry soil breeds dwarfs, and dry, windy soil breeds midgets. Not quite bonsai, but it is getting there.

Yet it was not merely this poor, stunted tree that caught my notice, but the sky above it—swirling, darkening, possibly hinting at an imminent shower. Behind the tree, a dry-stone wall marks the boundary between the enclosed fields of Aireyholme Farm and the wild moor of Roseberry Common. A feeling of solitude, resilience, and the vague threat that something is about to happen.