Felled by Andrew Hankinson: an ‘eerie and compelling’ book

In the autumn of 2023, Britain became gripped by “the renegade logging of the Sycamore Gap”, said Sarah Ditum in The Times. For a while, it was unclear who had carried out the “senseless felling” of the iconic, much-photographed 150-year-old tree, which stood next to Hadrian’s Wall on land owned by the National Trust. But eventually, the police arrested two Cumbrian friends, Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers – respectively a “rural odd-job” man and a self-taught mechanic.

Although the men denied responsibility, the evidence against them was compelling – not least because they’d filmed themselves committing the crime. In 2025, both were found guilty and sentenced to four years and three months in prison. The affair has now been revisited by journalist Andrew Hankinson, who is a “great chronicler of madness”: one of his previous books was a “stark and vivid account” of the last days of “Geordie murderer” Raoul Moat.

Combining “straight-up true crime” with elements of memoir and a bracing analysis of the grief and fury the crime unleashed, “Felled” is sharp, insightful and “fascinating”.

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For Hankinson, the story felt personal, said John Sturgis in The Critic: he’d proposed to his wife under the tree. But, while he “starts out outraged by what the pair had done”, he comes to “identify with both men”, seeing them above all as victims. Since their release from prison, they have struggled to find work and Graham, in particular, has had several mental-health crises. While Hankinson’s life has been quite different, he discloses his own struggles, particularly the impact of his own father’s death “around the time of the tree felling”. He even calls himself a “shit journalist” – although, in fact, as this “eerie and compelling” book shows, he’s a highly capable writer.

To this day, it remains unclear what motivated Graham and Carruthers, said Helen Barrett in the Financial Times. Hankinson’s best guess is that “violating the totems others hold dear may be a form of release” for people on the margins of society. Yet he implies that, if the act was “senseless”, so too was the “level of national anguish” it inspired.

It became a massive news story; the National Trust was invited by the court to submit a victim-impact statement, and pledged to create a “calming, reflective space”, honouring the memory of what it called “the People’s Tree”. As a “baffled” Canadian wrote to Hankinson after he published an article about the trial: “How in Gawd’s name does the UK arrive at the point of losing its collective mind over the loss of a tree?”