Two former friends who cut down the Sycamore Gap tree out of “sheer bravado” have each been jailed for four years and three months.
Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers may have hoped for a softer sentence after finally admitting their roles in chopping down the much-loved tree, which had stood for around 150 years.
Carruthers, a 32-year-old mechanic, confessed to cutting down the tree in an act of “drunken stupidity”, but claimed he could not remember committing the offence after drinking a bottle of whisky.
His one-time best pal Graham, 39, took a vantage point to film the vandalism on his mobile phone, saying he “just went along with it”.
Their explanations, however, were dismissed as not “wholly honest” by Ms Justice Lambert, who told them their mission was planned and “gave you some sort of thrill”.
At Newcastle Crown Court on Tuesday, the pair, who sat several metres apart in the dock, showed no reaction as they were handed their prison sentence in a courtroom packed with journalists and members of the public.
Both men had already been convicted of criminal damage to the tree and Hadrian’s Wall, which it fell on, in May.
Sentencing the defendants, Ms Justice Lambert told them their motivation was still not clear, but a large factor seemed to be “sheer bravado”.
She said: “Felling the tree in the middle of the night in a storm gave you some sort of thrill.
“You revelled in the coverage, taking pride in what you have done, knowing you were responsible for the crime so many people were talking about.”
Summing up what happened from the pair’s admissions in their pre-sentence reports, she added: “Adam Carruthers, your account that you had so much to drink that you had no memory of what happened is not plausible.
“The tree felling demonstrated skill and required deliberate and coordinated actions by you … this was not the work of someone whose actions were significantly impaired through drink.
“Nor, Daniel Graham, do I accept you just went along with your co-defendant. You filmed the whole event, you took photos of the chainsaw and wedge of trunk in the boot of your Range Rover. The next day, you appeared to revel in coverage of your actions in the media.”
Despite the difference in roles, and Graham’s claim he was being led by Carruthers’ “dream”, Ms Justice Lambert said both defendants were equally culpable.
At their trial, the jurors, who took just five hours to reach their verdicts, heard how the pair had travelled for more than 40 minutes from their homes in Cumbria to the landmark tree, before carrying their equipment across pitch-black moorland during a storm in September 2023.
They took a wedge from the tree as a trophy that has never been recovered, and relished the media coverage as news of the vandalism caused national and international headlines.
Andrew Gurney, speaking on behalf of Carruthers, told the court his client had chopped down the tree in an act that was “no more than drunken stupidity”.
“He felled that tree and it is something he will regret for the rest of his life. There’s no better explanation than that,” he added.
Chris Knox, representing Graham, said the groundworker was a “troubled man who has had very real difficulties in his life”. He said his client had also received hate mail, although this mitigation was discounted by Ms Justice Lambert during sentencing.
Andrew Poad, a National Trust manager, gave a victim impact statement which was read in court: “This iconic tree can never be replaced. Whilst the National Trust has cared for it on behalf of the nation, it belonged to the people. It was totemic.”
The tree, initially valued at £622,191, was a symbol of Northumberland, a site of countless family visits and featured in the Kevin Costner and Morgan Freeman film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
Its destruction took less than three minutes.
Two weeks after the damage, Northumbria Police received “a single strand of intelligence” that named Carruthers and Graham, before detectives linked Graham’s Range Rover with the area close to Sycamore Gap using automatic number-plate recognition on the night of 27 September 2023.
When police arrested the duo and searched Graham’s phone, they found the two-minute and 41-second video, which showed the tree being cut down at 12.30am. Messages and voice notes between Graham and Carruthers the next day showed them talking about the story going “wild” and “viral”.
Ms Justice Lambert said their offence had “an extraordinary social impact” and that it had caused “widespread distress”.
