Sycamore Gap tree suspect claims he was fixed up’

A man accused of chopping down the Sycamore Gap tree told police he had been fixed up” as officers searching his home discovered a phone with a video showing a wedge of wood in his car boot, a jury has heard.

- ALEX ROSS

Groundworker Daniel Graham, 39, told officers he was being framed for the crime as part of a dispute with someone stirring the pot”, Newcastle Crown Court heard yesterday.

Speaking in his first police interview, Mr Graham denied cutting down the sycamore, claiming he was not trained to fell anything as large as the famous tree that stood beside Hadrian’s Wall.

Prosecutors told the jury photographs and two short videos found on Mr Graham’s phone on the day of his arrest showed a piece of wood next to a chainsaw in the boot of his Range Rover.

Earlier in the trial, prosecutor Richard Wright KC suggested that Mr Graham and his co-accused Adam Carruthers, 32, took a wedge of the Sycamore Gap tree “perhaps as some sort of trophy”.

Mr Graham, of Carlisle, and Mr Carruthers, a mechanic from Wigton, Cumbria, each deny two counts of causing criminal damage to both the tree and Hadrian’s Wall, which the sycamore hit as it came down on the night of 27 September 2023.