The tree as it is today and, inset, Thomas Hardy

• I WAS sorry to hear of the threat to the ash in Old St Pancras Churchyard, surrounded by headstones from the graveyard exhumation overseen by Thomas Hardy in 1865, (Fears for The Hardy Tree as suspicious fungus attacks, August 8).

I had always assumed from the radiating layout of the slabs that they had actually been set up around the tree as a young sapling. One may have to accept that the tree, like the cedar in Highgate Cemetery, is too elderly to survive.

The significance of Hardy’s commission from Arthur Blomfield should not be missed. As an employee overseeing the excavation of graves, with the reinterment of remains and the setting of the tombstones Hardy was, in effect, the first commercial archaeologist involved in mitigating the impact of a major infra-structure project (using modern terminology!).

His work prefigured the similar work undertaken with the expansion of St Pancras station two decades ago and then the current work of exhuming and studying tens of thousands of burials from the St James churchyard for the HS2 project at Euston.

From his early days in Dorchester Hardy had been made aware of the impact of development on archaeological remains and almost a decade after the London project did an exemplary job of recording the Roman graves revealed during the construction of his house at Max Gate on the outskirts of the town.

If only he had known what we can now conclude about these Dorset men adapting to life in the early years of Britain as part of the wider Roman world with its links to Europe.

CHRISTOPHER SPAREY-GREEN
Avondale Square, SE1