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Two friends who embarked on a “moronic mission” to fell the Sycamore Gap tree with a chainsaw have been found guilty of “mindless” criminal damage.
Daniel Graham, 39, and Adam Carruthers, 32, cut down the cherished tree next to Hadrian’s Wall, in Northumberland, as Storm Agnes raged in the early hours of 28 September 2023.
They saw it as a “bit of a laugh” and afterwards “revelled” in their infamy as the crime made headlines around the world, a jury was told. They thought themselves “big or funny or clever”.
Both men denied charges of criminally damaging the tree and the wall it stood beside, a Unesco world heritage site.
They said they were at their homes in Cumbria at the time of the felling.
This was despite evidence showing that Graham’s car and phone were used in the crime. Both men had footage of the felling on their phones. The court heard they later exchanged messages about the headlines being generated by the felling.
The pair were found guilty on Friday after an eight-day trial at Newcastle crown court.
The prosecutor Richard Wright KC said the crime was a “moronic mission” and the “arboreal equivalent of mindless thuggery”, and that the pair showed a “basic lack of decency and courage to own up to what they did”.
He said: “Up and down the country and across the world, the reaction of all right-thinking people to the senseless felling of the Sycamore Gap tree has been one of sadness and anger.
“Who would do such a thing? Why would anyone do such a thing? Take something beautiful and destroy it for no good reason.”
He said the “public indignation, anger and downright disgust” at the felling had been palpable. “Far from being the big men they thought they were, everyone else thought that they were rather pathetic.”
The jury heard the pair deliberately chose a stormy night to fell the tree because strong winds make it easier to topple a big tree.
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One of the men filmed the felling on Graham’s iPhone 14, footage which was enhanced by police and shown to the jury.
Wright said the pair’s technique showed “expertise and a determined, deliberate approach” to their action.
A wedge of the trunk, removed as part of the felling process, was taken as “a trophy”. It has never been recovered but video footage and a photograph of it being in Graham’s car boot was on his phone.
Wright said that as the world’s media began reporting on the tree’s felling, the men shared social media posts, with Graham messaging Carruthers: “Here we go.”
Graham, who ran a groundwork business near Carlisle, told the court Carruthers was responsible and must have borrowed his car and phone while he was asleep in his caravan after taking a sleeping pill.
Carruthers, a mechanic living in a caravan in Kirkbride, said he was not at the site of the crime. His barrister, Andrew Gurney, said it made no sense for a man to be “gallivanting around the national park cutting down Sycamore Gap” just five days after his partner had left hospital with their newborn baby.
