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 (One of Britain's most famous trees) , 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, were convicted in early May 2025 on two counts of criminal damage.
Since the night of the felling, people have been looking for explanations and to find ways to put things right. Nicola Crowley of the National Trust, which manages the land at Sycamore Gap, explains: “As humans we have an inherent need to understand why things happen, and we didn’t have that. It really was an unprecedented event for us, and one we had to respond to almost immediately as word spread across social media and across the world. The public response was phenomenal, and it was soon evident that the tree was the people’s tree.”
Crowley has led the Trust’s response with the Trees of Hope campaign, which aims to transform the crime into a rallying cry for positive action. But before we get to that, it might be helpful to try to unravel why the two men did what they did.
Why was the Sycamore Gap tree felled?
Northumbria Police said that Graham and Carruthers never gave an explanation and it’s easy to bracket the felling as mindless malevolence. The men revelled in the outcry in the aftermath of the crime and their desire for fame fuelled by social media algorithms was captured in their hubristic online messages. It also led police quickly to their doors.
On the 15 July 2025 both were sentenced for four years and three months. The judge, Mrs Justice Lambert, said in sentencing: "I'm confident a major factor was sheer bravado."
And yet, grimly, their crime is not an isolated action. On 13 May 2025, it was reported that two beech trees were cut down along the River Wensum in Norfolk in what a local tree consultant said was “a Sycamore Gap copycat act of moronic vandalism”. Meanwhile, local anger continues to boil in Enfield over the wrongful felling of a 450-year-old oak in April this year. The owners of Toby Carvery, a family pub chain that has a restaurant overlooking the tree, admitted that they felled it after receiving advice that it was dead. It was merely in its early spring slumber and the felling appears to have been an opportunistic act to clear an obstacle to future developments.
One of the greatest shocks for those who live for the wild outdoors is the discovery that many people do not share this love. And while some of this is down to disconnection or lack of interest, there may be a rising tide of what writer Paul Evans calls “resentful cynicism” towards the environment. Add in the Government’s own rhetoric about nature “blocking” progress when talking about its new Planning and Infrastructure Bill, and the cancellation of the nature-friendly Sustainable Farming Incentive this year.
For many people hard pressed by cost-of-living issues, this negative mood music is encouragement to dismiss the natural world and ideas around ‘Net Zero’ as an obstacle to the ‘economic growth’ that politicians relentlessly promise will make everything better.
Perhaps this resentment influenced the actions of Carruthers and Graham. Cutting down the Sycamore Tree was an act of spite, two fingers stuck up at an amorphous ‘enemy’ comprising nature, do-gooders and ‘outsiders’ – a way for those who believe themselves put-upon and powerless to find a voice, even notoriety, however abhorrent.
Anger, resentment and money are powerful forces to be arrayed against nature. And yet, from the wreckage of the Sycamore Gap Tree, hope has emerged – the National Trust’s 49 Trees of Hope to be precise. Nicola Crowley, the Trust’s consultancy manager, curation and experiences, explains: “We wanted to harness the connection that people felt with nature and this special tree into a positive thing, so when the seeds that we gathered in the immediate aftermath started to propagate just months later, hope for the future and new beginnings also began to emerge.”
“We decided that we should identify 49 recipients [for a sapling], one for each foot of the tree’s height when felled, to receive a Tree of Hope. The public were asked to contact us to tell us what receiving a tree would mean to them and their community, where it would go and that it would
be accessible.
“The response was brilliant and we were so moved by all of the applications we received, it made the decision-making process extremely hard,” she adds. “We wanted to ensure we had a good geographical spread, and that a real breadth of issues, causes and themes were represented. There should be something for everyone.”
Crowley is hopeful for the future: “Now the Sycamore Gap Tree will live on at the heart of our communities, a symbol of hope, recovery and connection. Bringing the legacy of the tree to more people seems so fitting after such a senseless act.”
For battle-weary conservationists charting biodiversity losses and the climate emergency, it can be dispiriting that people are only moved by very obvious harm to the environment. They can point to the green deserts of monoculture farming, the insidious effects of pesticides on pollinators or the destruction of seabed habitat by trawlers and yet few seem to notice.
But cut down one famous tree and newspapers and social media are afire with anger and demands for action. In a similar vein, the appalling state of our rivers only perhaps captured national attention when rowers in the annual Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race reported falling ill after swimming in the sewage-blighted Thames in 2024.
But to harbour anger and frustration at this is to fly in the face of human behaviour. We are creatures of ritual and familiarity. We need big emotional moments to move us – great shared dramas that inspire us to collective action. When I think of my own understanding of the natural world, it has taken 40 years of hard-won experience – and is still very limited. To reach others without that groundwork, we need shortcuts.
So, sometimes charismatic trees, beavers and white-tailed eagles have equal power to engage the wider public in an attention-poor world as the latest State of Nature report, with all its brilliantly researched statistics and unarguable findings. And from these high-profile events, some people will become ‘activated’ and see similar problems in their own local areas that they can tackle.
Just take the example of Carol-Anne O’Callaghan in Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, saving veteran oaks that were going to be chopped down to make way for HS2. She said she had never taken part in any campaigning before and previously had “no idea” about the impact HS2 construction was having on the environment.
After learning that rare bats were roosting in the trees, O’Callaghan realised she could build a case to save the trees. Incredibly, she raised £40,000 from an online campaign to pay for a lawyer, engineer and ecologist and was able to persuade the HS2 planners to change tack. “Our heads have come together – it’s a joining of ideas and forces which shows collaboration in a cooperative way – being inclusive and talking to everyone. It’s a win-win situation,” said O’Callaghan. Her actions could become a blueprint for how communities and individuals who feel ‘bulldozed’ by councils, big infrastructure projects and legal jargon can engage with the process and drive meaningful change for nature and their communities.
Then this spring, amidst the anger, the court case and the demands for retribution, the Sycamore Gap Tree quietly threw up fresh shoots from its stump. It’s not dead, of course. Those unhappy men who thought they were gaining prestige by felling a precious tree have simply ended up coppicing it. As Nicola Crowley put it: “Sycamore Gap is the tree that keeps giving.” It will outlive the men who tried to kill it.
