'It was like stealing joy'

Loss of a landmark that brought tears and hope

- Mark Brown

"It was just a tree," said a mystified Adam Carruthers, one of the two men who illegally cut down the tree at Sycamore Gap in the early hours of a stormy night nearly two years ago. "It was almost as if someone had been murdered."

Carruthers was right about the reaction to the tree's felling. Many people likened its loss to that of a good friend or relative. Its destruction prompted feelings of sadness, grief and then blind fury. Some people wept.

Carruthers was wrong to see it as just a tree. It was a beautiful, life-enhancing place for countless photographs, declarations of love, engagements, birthdays and ash scatterings, but it was more than that. Many considered it part of the DNA of north-east England. Its felling was seen as a symbol of humanity's wider war on nature. Its legacy is fast becoming one of hope and optimism.

None of this was in the minds of Carruthers, 32, and Daniel Graham, 39, when they travelled from their homes in Cumbria to Northumberland on 27 September 2023 in Graham's black Range Rover Sport with a chainsaw in the boot. When they got to the tree, which has stood on Hadrian's Wall since the late 19th century, they set about methodically cutting it down. They apparently saw it as a laugh.

One cut the tree down while the other videoed him on Graham's iPhone. After the footage, lasting two minutes and 40 seconds, was shown to a packed courtroom in Newcastle there was silence. It was upsetting to watch. The judge ordered a 15-minute break.

The video, enhanced by police experts, shows a silhouetted man wielding the chainsaw. Its dreadful, piercing revving echoes through the windy emptiness. Then comes the sound of the tree cracking and crashing down on to the wall.

It took minutes to destroy a tree that had stood for more than 100 years, the prosecutor Richard Wright KC told the court.