Sycamore Gap represented so much more than just one tree - Christa Ackroyd

Of course others have simply shrugged their shoulders and said yes it’s a shame, but it’s just a tree. And I am sad to say that when I was a youngster I might have thought the same were it not for three young girls from my home city who in a changing world changed the world. And changed mine.

Life was busy when I was a teenager growing up in Bradford. I had places to go, plans to make, exciting times to be had, a whole future in front of me. And quite frankly scenery was low on my list of my priorities. Show me the latest offerings in the window of Chelsea Girl and I would be saving up to buy them from my Saturday job on a knicker stall in Kirkgate Market.

Either that or trying out the newest purple lip colour from Biba which prompted my mother to tell me it made me look proper poorly. But show me scenery, talk to me of trees and wide open spaces and my eyes would glaze over.

Dad was the exact the opposite. Maybe as a police officer he had seen too much and had to deal with the darker side of life too often. For him the Sunday run in the car to the countryside was sacrosanct. And scenery was at the heart of it. Where to stop to get out the flask of tea, the sandwiches and the boiled eggs was determined by what was considered to be the best spot.

And I can’t tell you how many hours the family posed for a photograph in front of a ‘beautiful view’ while dad found the right angle in the best light. Of course I treasure the memories and those photographs now. I even have the rug we used to spread out on the grass in my car boot.

Fortunately as I grew up I learned that there was more to life than material things, as my mum told me I would. That some things, like nature and history money can’t buy. And they must be fought for and preserved.

I think it’s the loss of permanence that has got people so upset about Sycamore Gap. Three hundred years that tree has stood there. Three hundred years people have walked miles to visit its beauty, pause a while and escape the world, if only for a moment And now it’s gone. Lost forever and with it a million stories, if only trees could talk.

All this immediately brought to mind my favourite trees. There are eight of them, coincidently sycamores too. But for me they represent a part of our history that has always captivated me and something else which could be lost unless we act quickly.

The eight trees are 200 years old now and are equally as tall, strong and beautiful as the tree at Hadrian’s Wall. I guarantee most of you won’t know of their existence, yet many of you will have driven past them.

They are planted on the edge of a once derelict graveyard on what was a old toll road for wool traders travelling in and out of the burgeoning city of Bradford. The overgrown site and it’s hidden past was saved by my lovely friend Steve and is tended by him and his volunteers.

That graveyard was beside a simple church, The Old Bell Chapel, where Patrick Bronte came to preach in Thornton 200 years ago with his wife and his two young children. By the time he left a few years later bound for greater things in Haworth, his family had grown with the birth of Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother Branwell.

Before he ventured over the wild moors to his new parish, the Reverend Patrick Bronte planted eight small saplings, each representing himself his wife and his six children. Today they tower over the site of the derelict church ruins. And I love them for all the romance in their story.

So why am I telling you this. Because in the next week or so local residents including Steve and myself are launching a campaign to save the humble home where the Bronte sisters were born and lived just a stone’s throw from that graveyard, a little terraced house on Market Street.

They plan to open it up to visitors, particularly young people from Bradford and beyond, so they too can learn the valuable lesson the three famous sisters taught us, that no matter where you are born, no matter how humble your origins, with belief, hard work and a refusal to take no for answer you can achieve.

Saving the Bronte birthplace won’t change the world. Just like the cutting down one tree won’t end it.

But if one young person is inspired by three girls who were laughed at when they said they wanted to become writers but went on to become the greatest literary family in the world tackling such taboo subjects as gender, race and class two centuries ago, then it is worth all the effort and hard work this dedicated band are putting in.

And when they launch their community share offer very soon on www.brontebirthplace.com I hope you will join them.

At the moment the Bronte birthplace with its blue plaque stands sad, forlorn and empty. The campaigners plan for it to be reopened in time for Bradford’s City of culture in 2025. You will even be able to sleep in the same bedrooms where the girls once dreamed their dreams and sit awhile by the very fireplace besides which they were born.

Above all, that little house with all its history needs once more to echo to the sound of creativity and laughter as it did in the days of the Brontes.

They were the reason I started writing. They were the reason as a young girl in Bradford I began to realise that there’s more to life than worrying about whether you are dressed in the latest fashion or having a good time, that the pen really is mightier than the sword when I picked up their books. And that we should never be afraid to tackle things we see which are wrong.

Sometimes all it takes is preserving a piece of the past to give someone a glimpse of their future. There were never any writers mightier in my book than three little girls born in front of the fireplace in a house in Thornton you probably didn’t even know existed.

That little house needs saving for Yorkshire, for the nation but particularly for a much maligned city as it moves towards what could be the greatest year in its cultural history since the Brontes took up their pens. And that, dear readers, as Charlotte once wrote, is a legacy worth preserving. Sometimes a tree is more than just a tree. And a house is more than just a building.