Felled

The Killing at Sycamore Gap

This is the story of a crime that reverberated around the world. The victim is a tree.

This is the story of a crime that reverberated around the world. The victim is a tree.

For more than a century, the tree at Sycamore Gap stood along Hadrians Wall in Northumberland. Planted in the nineteenth century, it became an iconic local landmark. It was immortalised in the 1991 film Robin Hood starring Kevin Costner, which transformed it into a symbol of the North East. One night in September 2023, two men Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers cut it down, prompting a manhunt and trial that played out through global headlines and an ensuing huge media outcry that took on a whole life of its own.

Felled is about who these men are, why they cut this particular tree down and why the world felt so strongly about it. It is a portrait of two men who existed in the cracks; men who perhaps did