On 9 May 2025, a jury of seven women and five men delivered unanimous guilty verdicts on ground worker Daniel Graham, 39, and mechanic Adam Carruthers, 32, for an act of vandalism that had been committed almost twenty months earlier. Sentencing will take place on 15 July. The trial at Newcastle Crown Court in the north of England had opened before Mrs. Justice Lambert on 28 April. The defendants, who had denied all the charges, having entered no-guilty pleas in June 2024, were found guilty of two counts of criminal damage: £622,191 of damage to a sycamore tree and an additional £1,144 of damage to an adjacent section of Hadrian’s Wall (a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987) between Milecastle 39 and Crag Lough in Northumberland. Graham and Carruthers have been remanded in custody, and a prison sentence seems likely.
On the morning of 28 September 2023, during Storm Agnes (27-28 September), it was noted that a sycamore tree (Acer pseudoplatanus), located in a natural dip in the landscape alongside Hadrian’s Wall, close to the village of Once Brewed, had been illegally felled overnight. It was subsequently ascertained that the two men had driven for forty minutes in Graham’s black Range Rover Sport, from Carlisle in the neighbouring county of Cumbria, on a “moronic mission”-in the words of Prosecutor Richard Wright, KC- for reasons that remain unclear to this day. Their misdeed was documented on a two-minute- and-forty-second-long video, filmed on Graham’s phone at 12.32am on 28 September. The poor-quality images benefited from digital enhancement by Northumbria Police, while the sound effects were self-explanatory. Other incriminating evidence was provided by an ANPR camera at Brampton in Cumbria and by CCTV images at the Twice Brewed Inn in Bardon Mill. The pair marked the site of the cut with silver spray paint, expertly felled the tree, and departed with a wedge of the felled tree- a trophy which has yet to be recovered. Their friendship was not to survive this act of ecological vandalism, for which they have since blamed each other. Both men were arrested, at separate locations in Cumbria, on 31 October 2023.
The Sycamore Gap tree, an ‘iconic’ and much photographed and filmed tree, was planted by a wealthy local landowner, John Clayton (1792-1890), sometime between 1860 and 1890. It had been under the care of the National Trust since 1942, gaining its nickname of the “Robin Hood Tree” after featuring in an early sequence in the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Victory in a Woodland Trust competition made it England Tree of the Year for 2016. Since the felling, the stump has shown signs of life and the tree is expected to regain its lost glory over the next 150 years. Saplings from the seeds gathered at the site have been sent across the UK in support of various good causes.
The Sycamore Gap tree was not protected by a Tree Preservation Order (TPOs), which enable local planning authorities to protect specific trees, groups of trees, or woodlands from deliberate damage and destruction, including felling, lopping, topping, uprooting or otherwise wilful damage. The aim is to protect trees that are considered local amenities, with the threat of prosecution, including up to £20,000 in fines, for any violations. Procedures for TPOs are determined by the Town and County Planning (Tree Preservation) (England) Regulations 2012, which came into force on 6 April 2012. Proactive imposition of TPOs on hitherto unprotected ancient and culturally important trees may provide a way forward in the aftermath of other incidents, such as the recent felling of a 500-year-old oak tree in the vicinity of a Toby Carvery pub at Enfield in north London.
The naïve pair revelled in the notoriety that followed their act, exchanging social media posts and news reports, but had misjudged the extent of the public outcry that was to follow.
Trees are important to many British people, who have on occasion been described as a nation of ‘tree-huggers.’ Trees are aesthetically pleasing, benefit the environment, help keep the air clean, support birdlife, and are part of the nation’s shared heritage, having contributed to Britain’s history, folklore, legends, and mythology. Many people develop deep emotionally attachments to trees, both in their vicinity and further away. The widespread outrage over the mindless felling of the Sycamore Gap tree was to be expected and will be punished accordingly, although the exact nature of the exemplary punishment to be meted out, including the length of any likely prison sentence, out is a matter for debate. Fines, community service, and suspended sentences are possible alternatives in the process of re-educating the “moronic” Sycamore Gap vandals and bringing them to their senses.
Ashis Banerjee