‘Moronic’ friends guilty of chopping down iconic 150-year-old Sycamore Gap tree

Two friends who filmed themselves cutting down the famous Sycamore Gap tree at Hadrian’s Wall during a ‘moronic mission’ have been found guilty of criminal damage.

Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers drove 40 minutes at night to reach the remote spot in Northumberland, in September 2023.

They took just 2min 41sec to fell the centuries-old tree in a ‘mindless act of vandalism’, jurors at Newcastle Crown Court were told.

The pair took a wedge of the trunk as a trophy and spent the next day ‘revelling’ in news reports about the crime.

Prosecutors said the ‘odd couple’ who did everything together had thought it would be ‘a bit of a laugh’.

But they soon realised they ‘weren’t the big men they thought they were’ when they saw the public outrage they had caused by committing ‘the arboreal equivalent of mindless thuggery’.

On Friday, groundworker Graham, 39, and mechanic Carruthers, 32, were each found guilty of two counts of criminal damage – one to the much-photographed tree and one to Hadrian’s Wall, which was damaged when the sycamore fell on it.

There was no visible reaction from either in the dock as the jury returned after just over five hours to convict them of causing £622,191 of criminal damage to the tree and £1,144 of damage to the wall.

The trial heard the ‘totemic’ sycamore had stood for more than 100 years in a dramatic dip in Hadrian’s Wall, becoming a popular spot for everything from picnics to proposals – and achieving worldwide fame when it was featured in the 1991 Kevin Costner film Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves.

Opening the case to jurors, prosecutor Richard Wright KC said: ‘Though the tree had grown for over a hundred years, the act of irreparably damaging it was the work of a matter of minutes.’

Jurors heard Graham and Carruthers were ‘best of pals’ at the time and regularly worked together felling trees.

The court heard Graham’s Land Rover was picked up on automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras between Carlisle and Sycamore Gap at night on September 27, 2023, and returning early the next morning.

His phone was traced to cell sites making the same journey.

When police arrested the pair and searched Graham’s phone, they found a two minute and 41 second video which showed the sycamore being cut down at 12.30am on September 28, and had been sent to Carruthers.

They also found photos and videos of a wedge of tree trunk and a chainsaw in the boot of Graham’s Range Rover, although these have never been found.

Messages and voice notes between Graham and Carruthers the next day showed them talking about the story going ‘wild’ and ‘viral’, referring to ‘an operation like we did last night’ and joking that damage looked like it had been done by a professional.

But, Mr Wright said, by the time their trial started 18 months later, the pair had ‘lost their courage’ and their once close friendship had collapsed, with each apparently blaming the other.

Graham accused Carruthers of taking his Range Rover and mobile phone to Sycamore Gap that night without his knowledge.

He said he had now turned on his former friend because his business was being affected by Carruthers’ actions.

Graham claimed during his evidence that Carruthers had a fascination with the sycamore, saying he had described it as ‘the most famous tree in the world’ and spoken of wanting to cut it down, even keeping a piece of string in his workshop that he had used to measure the circumference.

Carruthers denied this and told the court he could not understand the outcry over the story, saying it was ‘just a tree’.

Cross examining Carruthers, Wright asked him: ‘Is that what’s at the heart of this?

‘You thought it was “just a tree”, and when the rest of the world didn’t think it was “just a tree” and it was a terrible and wicked thing to have done, you’ve lost your bottle and can’t own up to it?’

They will be sentenced on July 15.

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