Row with diocese over 250-year-old tree

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Watch as Richard Gray, who lives next to the 12th century West Midlands church, discusses the "splendid" 250-year-old Sycamore tree which the diocese has ordered to be chopped down or Mr Gray pay for a £70,000 root barrier.

Transcript

00:00My name's Richard Gray. What we're looking at here is a rather splendid sycamore tree that's

00:06estimated to be something like 250 years old and what's particularly interesting about it is the

00:13fact that it's got four trunks. Locally it's known as the Four Shires sycamore because we're close to

00:19a thing called the Four Shires Stone and it's evocative of that. It's a wonderful citadel

00:26for local invertebrates. You can't get better than a big old tree if you're an insect and boy we've

00:35got plenty around here but we won't have if the church get their way because they want to cut

00:40this wonderful tree down because they claim in spite of evidence to the contrary that the tree

00:48was causing damage to their relatively new 40 year old or so new vicarage. Evidence suggests

00:56it's actually rather more complex than a simple tree. It's the whole story of global warming

01:03and so on and in addition to that this tree was owned by the church prior to them building

01:11their new vicarage. They actually owned it but consented to it being left in their own garden

01:20after their new vicarage was built and I inherited the tree together with my wife at the time in

01:27something like 1992 and it's remained there ever since. Our building which is about the

01:34same distance as the new building from the tree built in about 1770 has no signs of any damage

01:42whatsoever and in fact the new vicarage you'd struggle to see any signs of damage to that.

01:49Most of the damage that's been pointed out to me by our friends in the church is actually

01:54inside the new vicarage and if you look at their engineers drawings you will see a thing

02:01called the area of concern which is epicentral to the new vicarage and shows nothing on the

02:07outside which could have possibly been caused by the tree. So here we are locking horns with

02:14an organisation that's supposed to have the pastoral care of its community in its hands

02:20that's doing exactly the opposite. A letter out of the blue claiming that the tree is doing

02:26this damage threatening to charge something like £80,000 if the tree isn't taken down. Their

02:33own engineers report has the words in it. We've looked at the tree. The tree is not the cause.

02:40More likely it is the hot weather that we've had recently. And there we are. What do we do?

02:46I don't think we're going to pay. We're not going to take the tree down and the church is still

02:51threatening despite the evidence to send us a rather large bill. Bishop, spare that tree.

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