The Sycamore Gap: justice but no answers

In the end, the jury at Newcastle Crown Court reached a unanimous verdict, said Jan Moir in The Mail on Sunday. Daniel Graham, 39, and Adam Carruthers, 32, were found guilty of criminal damage – for cutting down the Sycamore Gap tree next to Hadrian's Wall.

The evidence was certainly damning. Graham's car and phone had been geolocated close to the Sycamore Gap on 27 September 2023, the stormy night when the tree was cut down; on both their phones was a video, dating from that very night, of a large tree being chainsawed. The pair, the jury heard, had discussed the story triumphantly by text the following day. But they later fell out, and Graham reported Carruthers to the police, suggesting that his friend had taken his car and phone to do the deed; Carruthers denied everything.

All in all, it was clear justice had been done. But questions remained. The "two hobbity men from deepest Cumbria" were led out of court without revealing one crucial issue: "why the hell they did it in the first place".

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The prosecution had its theories, said the Daily Mirror. It seems Carruthers was obsessed with the tree, and wanted a "trophy" to mark the birth of his daughter. "As their risible fabrications in court made clear, neither are the brightest of men," said The Times. But it seems they thought cutting it down would be "a bit of a laugh": so they destroyed something in three minutes that had taken more than a century to grow.

Well, I think the furore is absurd, said Melanie Reid in The Observer. You'd think it was "murder", from the way everyone has carried on. But the sycamore was, as Carruthers plaintively told the jury, "just a tree". No one was hurt. Now these two men – poor, uneducated, from one of the most deprived areas of the UK – face sentences of up to ten years in prison.

Sure, it was "only" a tree, said Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times. But it "had stood for 150 years or more. It was gazed at by people in the reign of Queen Victoria." Hadrian's Wall, which framed it, has been there for 1,900 years. To look at it was not just to take in a beautiful view but to be connected to other people and other times, in "a tapestry of shared experience". I'm not surprised at the "outpouring of grief".