BY PHILIP WALLING
On a beautiful spring day in early May 2025, the eight-day trial of two Cumbrian men at Newcastle Crown Court ended when the jury returned a unanimous verdict that they were of guilty of criminal damage. In September 2023, they had felled the Sacred Sycamore on Hadrian’s Wall.
Mrs Justice Lambert adjourned sentence until July 15 for reports. She refused bail for both defendants. Daniel Graham, now 41, had been in prison since December 2024, apparently for his own protection because he had failed to attend a couple of previous hearings and had tried to commit suicide. Although co-defendant Adam Carruthers, now 34, had faithfully attended every hearing, the judge also sent him straight to prison after the verdict. I suppose the rationale would be that he might as well get used to being locked up.
During the trial neither defendant covered himself in glory. Graham mounted what is known as a cut-throat defence and blamed Carruthers. While Carruthers didn’t explicitly blame Graham, he denied being involved despite the police having assembled a great deal of circumstantial evidence that pointed to his participation. Both defendants were at best evasive, ducking questions and frequently replying ‘possibly’ when a question demanded a yes or no answer. At worst they tried to lie their way, often pointlessly, through cross-examination by Richard Wright KC, prosecuting. They presented a sorry, diminished pair in the dock and seemed bewildered and broken by the onslaught that the legal system had unleashed on them.
Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers
As Wright KC said, what they conceived as a bit of a laugh unfolded into a nightmare. It went against Carruthers when he said he couldn’t understand why such a storm had been whipped up: ‘It’s just a tree. It’s not as if anybody was murdered.’ And to his astonishment it had attracted tremendous media interest, both national and international. On most days there weren’t enough places in the press box and the court usher rationed seats by taking the first twelve from a list she had drawn up. It was the highest profile trial in Newcastle in the last decade, eclipsing everything, including murders of children.
On July 15 2025 Graham and Carruthers were each sentenced to four years and three months in prison for felling the Sacred Sycamore, valued for the purposes of the trial at £622,191, and dislodging a few stones from Hadrian’s Wall. One of those who covered the proceedings, Andrew Hankinson, has just published Felled, a very readable account of the trial and something of the lives of the two men who did the deed.
This book is a textbook example of showing, not telling (with Hankinson’s own life interlaced into the narrative), in a singular, Hemingwayesque style. He stops just short of broadening it into an allegory of the collective insanity and dissolution of our society, but we get a flavour of the trial and a sympathetic delving into the background of the two men.
Hankinson admits he was ‘gutted’ and ‘furious’ when the tree was chopped down. He had proposed to his wife under it. It had become a ‘special place’ in the hearts of thousands of people. Although many had never visited it and only learned about it from a Hollywood film, the emotional reaction to its felling was in a way reminiscent of the fandango that erupted after the death of Princess Diana. Large numbers of people appeared to have lost their senses – or at least their sense of proportion – and struggled to separate their feelings from reason.
This is well exemplified in an impact statement from a manager at the National Trust, read out by the prosecution 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 a totemic symbol for many . . . a place of sanctuary – a calming reflective space.’ At this point Hankinson asks whether we might feel ‘the country’s becoming one big psychiatric hospital, where we’re all expected to speak in hushed voices and the sharp objects are gradually being removed’.
The manager continued: ‘The outpouring of emotion as the public responded to the felling was unprecedented for the National Trust. The overwhelming sense of loss and confusion was felt across the world.’
The statement went on to describe the National Trust team dealing with the felled tree as ‘devastated and saddened by the events . . . overwhelmed and grateful for the thousands of messages of support and offers of help’. It talks about the ‘emotional burden on all members of the local team . . . and those that have been working on the Sycamore Gap loss, has been considerable and profound. It has affected people differently, increased workloads and additional stress factors all required managing carefully – all done against a backdrop of the nation wanting answers for what happened.’
The National Trust manager was right. The tree was ‘iconic’, it was a ‘totem’. But it was an icon and a totem of the modern liberal state that despises young white working-class men, such as these two Cumbrians. Men living on the edge of society, victims of a defective education system, broken families, Graham badly affected by his father’s suicide and neither of them terribly emotionally robust. But they both worked for a living, had little to do with the state (that ultimately crushed them) and tried to make their way in the world against an established order that thwarted them at every turn. Particularly the planning system that deprived Daniel Graham of the right to build somewhere to live and work on land he had earned money to buy. The council wouldn’t even let him maintain a static caravan on his little piece of land.
These are the native Cumbrian iteration of ‘white van man’. They have skills that most of the people who went into emotional meltdown over the felling couldn’t hope to acquire. They could both climb trees with a chainsaw and bring them down in pieces on the end of a rope. Daniel Graham could drive all kinds of machinery and operate a digger. He laid tarmac, dug drains and did site work. He could turn his hand to most practical things to do with land.
Adam Carruthers had skill with engines and could mend anything mechanical. He was handy with a chainsaw, climbing trees with ropes, although he tried to downplay his ability when it dawned on him just how fierce was the whirlwind he had sown.
Both men come from a flat overlooked corner of north Cumberland, much of it formerly marsh, close to the Solway Firth, west of Carlisle and bordering Scotland. This is a land of smallholdings, white pebble-dashed bungalows and paddocks roughly fenced to keep in the ubiquitous horses. It is a land of individualists whose ancestors lived over hundreds of years with the ever-present danger of murder and pillage by the Scots and theft of their goods and cattle. Graham and Carruthers are two of the Border family names with a long pedigree in this cross-border warfare.
They are the kind of men upon whom polite society, particularly as seen in the form of the National Trust and its staff and members, depend but would rather not acknowledge. Of course they are rough, there’s no doubt, but without being able to express it, they were reacting to a society that persecutes them and makes them scapegoats for its own hypocrisy. Because when that same society wants a dangerous tree brought down or a drain cleaning out these are just the kind of men they call upon. In 1943 George Orwell recalled the hypocrisy about similar men in the Army: ‘people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.’
Hankinson’s book takes us through the process he underwent as he sat through the trial and came to sympathise with the lives of the two men. Anybody observing the trial and understanding something of their lives would find it hard not to feel empathy with them. To his credit, Hankinson takes us from his being furious when the tree was felled to ‘After hearing about their lives, the caravans, Daniel talk about his dad [referring to his father’s suicide] I felt that if the value of the tree determined whether they went to prison, then it was worth nothing to me at all.’
The significance of this trial hasn’t yet permeated public consciousness because most people do not want to try to understand why the men felled the tree. Nor do their myriad accusers examine their own emotional reaction to its felling. Hankinson’s book takes us some way along a path of sympathy for the men. He gives some insight into how where they come from has affected them: North Cumberland is remote, rural and alien to people who live in what they fondly believe are more sophisticated places. He doesn’t pretend to understand fully the reason the men felled the tree, but this important book takes us closer to the understanding that would allow us to forgive them. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.
Footnote: Carruthers was released under the Home Detention Curfew Scheme in March this year and is serving the remainder of his sentence at his home in Wigton, Cumbria. Graham, of Carlisle, was released under licence last month.
The National Trust has grown these saplings from the Sacred Sycamore’s seeds
Philip Walling has written the Sunday Times bestseller Counting Sheep and Till the Cows Come Home. You can read his earlier article on the Sacred Sycamore here.
This article was republished by kind suggestion of Ashworth & Ashworth who run an excellent SubStack here. Hankinson’s book is available here.