Imagine standing in a steaming, tropical rainforest, amidst the leaves of giant ferns and horsetails. You are in Stanhope – 320 million years ago! The Stanhope fossil tree grew in this forest and like all fossils it tells a fascinating story of ancient life in the distant past.

The story of the Stanhope tree takes us back to the time in Earth history known as the Carboniferous Period. Back in those distant times there was nothing you would have recognised as the North Pennines – in fact, even Britain did not yet exist. The piece of the Earth’s crust which would eventually become northern England lay almost astride the equator, covered by rainforests and fringed by shallow, tropical seas.

Fossil tree

When the tree died and was buried, sand from a nearby river filled the space left by the rotting wood, and eventually hardened into sandstone. The sandstone now forms a perfect cast of the original tree. You can even see the impressions of the bark on the trunk. Natural casts of small trunks, roots and logs are quite common in the local sandstone – but spectacular specimens like the Stanhope tree are rare.

The Stanhope tree was found in a sandstone quarry at Edmundbyers Cross, north of Stanhope, in 1915. A similar fossil tree was found in 1914 and
taken to the Hancock Museum in Newcastle. The tree shown here was brought to Stanhope in the early 1960s, in large pieces which were reassembled in the churchyard of St. Thomas’ Church in Stanhope Market Place.