Hope emerges

The felling of the Sycamore Gap Tree appalled and saddened millions. Yet, as Fergus Collins discovers, hope can spring from the darkest ecological tragedies

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It’s dark. The footage is grainy but you can see the silhouette of a tree with a horizon line swooping behind it. At the tree’s foot is a shadow, which unfurls into a man-shape. A chainsaw snarls into life and roars for many seconds while the shadow bends low to the tree. Then a moment’s silence and, with a violent cracking, the great silhouette falls.

Just 22 seconds of video but it captures the moment in September 2023 when the Sycamore Gap Tree, beloved by millions worldwide, was destroyed by two men – one cutting, one filming. It was an act of calculated vandalism that has baffled and angered locals, visitors and lovers of the countryside everywhere.

The tree, a sycamore framed in a natural dip along Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, has been the star of movie scenes – most notably in Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves – the Woodland Trust’s Tree of the Year 2016, and the backdrop to hundreds of marriage proposals and millions of Instagram photos. Until two men with little apparent motive beyond “a grimly male mix of bragging-rights, trophy-hunting” as writer Robert Macfarlane puts it, took a chainsaw to it in a “pseudo-military operation”. The men, Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers from Cumbria, have been convicted on two counts of criminal damage and sentenced to four years and three months in prison.