How best friends who felled Sycamore Gap tree turned on each other

Telegraph

09-05-2025

Before the Sycamore Gap tree was cut down Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers were the 'best of pals'.
The 'odd pair' had an almost obsessive friendship. They texted each other constantly, had nicknames for each other and spoke on the phone everyday.
This was in addition to often working together, tarmacing drives, cutting down trees after storms and repairing fences.
By the time they appeared in court accused of cutting down one of the country's most cherished landmarks, a 150-year-old sycamore growing next to Hadrian's Wall, however, the 'daggers were out'.
Both men were more than willing to sacrifice their friendship to escape a jail sentence.
Graham lived in a caravan in a makeshift shanty town he had built on a field in Grinsdale, Carlisle.
At 39 he was a few years older than his co-accused, Carruthers, 32, but the pair developed a close friendship after Graham's father passed away.
While Graham's neighbours were unsurprised to learn he was involved, people in Carruthers's home town were astonished to discover he had a part in felling the tree.
They described him as a 'quiet young man' who had become caught up with 'some rum bloke he worked for near Carlisle'.
One neighbour said: 'He had quite a good job as an apprentice at the Innovia factory in Wigton, but they had to let him go because they discovered he'd been working on cars on the side.
'Since then he's drifted around and ended up doing ground work with this character he somehow met.'
The neighbour continued: 'It's hard to imagine how he got himself caught up in cutting down the tree at Sycamore Gap. It's an act of madness and he just wasn't the kind of lad to do something like that.'
On Sept 27 2023, the pair decided to put into action what they thought was an ingenious plan.
In the middle of the night, they drove Graham's dented Range Rover 30 miles into Northumberland National Park to visit a local beauty spot, the Sycamore Gap.
Once they arrived, one of them got out a chainsaw, lugged it up the steep hill from the car park to Hadrian's Wall, and cut down the 200-year-old tree in a matter of minutes.
As he did so, the other man filmed it on Graham's phone. Neither has ever admitted being the one who physically felled the tree.
The next morning, they exchanged messages in which they joked about the 'operation we did last night'.
After the tree was discovered the pair began swapping screenshots of social media posts and press reports.
'Here we go,' Graham said, before adding: 'Not a bad angle on that stump… That's clearly a professional.'
Graham, seemingly getting more and more excited about the media storm, even sent a voice note to Carruthers using an affectionate nickname he had come up with for his mate, 'Jeffrey'.
'Jeffrey, it's gone viral, it's gone worldwide, it will be on ITV News tonight,' he said.
A month after the felling, the pair were arrested and questioned under caution. During their first police interviews, both denied any involvement in the crime.
After they were arrested again and re-interviewed three days later, the first cracks began to appear in the once-unbreakable friendship.
Graham continued to deny responsibility but indicated that the person responsible had 'young kids'.
Carruthers, a father of two who had his second child just 12 days before the tree was felled, continued to answer 'no comment'.
On April 30 2024, the two men were charged with causing criminal damage to the tree and the adjacent Hadrian's Wall.
Two weeks later, on May 15, Graham and Carruthers attended court alongside one another.
On the surface, they were still firm friends. They decided to wear costumes to prevent court photographers from revealing their identity.
Graham wore a black balaclava, with large aviator sunglasses covering his eyes, while Carruthers sported a black hood which covered his entire face.
By the summer of 2024 however, things had changed.
Graham, apparently finally realising the seriousness of the situation, decided it was every man for himself.
On Aug 23, he made a 10-minute anonymous phone call to police and said: 'One of the lads that [felled the tree], Adam Carruthers, has got the saws back in his possession.'
'There is also a part of the tree with the saws as well,' Graham said.
He ended the call by claiming that his former friend had a number of firearms on the property.
In December that year, Graham, who by this time had been photographed going into court without his balaclava, decided his friend's face should also be seen by the public.
Posting a picture of Carruthers holding a pair of owls on Facebook, he wrote: 'I did not cut down the sycamore gap. I did not do it.'
He added: 'It's my picture everywhere… Well here's a picture of the man with [the] hidden face.'
Prosecuting at Newcastle Crown Court, Richard Wright KC described the pair as an 'odd couple' who had an 'obsessive' friendship.
He said that 'before the daggers came out' the men were 'really, really close friends'. 'Obsessively close you may think,' he added.
Graham was the first to give evidence and began by confirming that he and Carruthers were indeed the 'best of pals' in September 2023.
Becoming emotional, he said they became friends after Carruthers restored a Land Rover Defender which had been the 'pride and joy' of Graham's father.
Graham's voice cracked as he recalled how his father killed himself and Carruthers ensured the vehicle could be used for his funeral.
Moments later, he began explaining to the jury, in detail, how Carruthers had supposedly called him the morning after the tree was felled and claimed to be responsible.
He went further and alleged Carruthers had previously spoken of wanting to cut down the tree and even kept a piece of string in his workshop that he had used to measure its circumference.
Graham said he personally knew nothing about the tree until Carruthers told him about it in 2021.
'He told me it was the most famous tree in the world,' he said.
Graham later claimed that Carruthers asked him to take the blame for the crime 'because he had mental health issues' and would be treated more leniently.
He insisted he was not the person using his Range Rover or mobile phone, both of which could be placed at the scene of the crime on the night the tree was cut down.
When asked why he had snitched on his friend by making the anonymous phone call, he said it was because the negative backlash from the crime was 'costing him money' and affecting his business.
Carruthers, who gave evidence after watching his former friend spend a day and a half accusing him of lying, also began by speaking about how close the pair had once been.
He said they would talk on the phone every day, sometimes twice, and said Graham was one of his closest friends.
When they did jobs together, he said, the pair would always halve the money without any argument.
He explained that his former friend had given him a nickname: 'He used to refer to us as Jeff. I'm not sure how or where it came from. He just started calling us it once and it stuck.'
When asked how the friendship came to an end, he said: 'I was at work one night and he turned up in his van and he pulled up into the yard and he said: 'I'm going to go my way you're going to go your way. I believe you've been grassing on me.''
Unlike his friend, Carruthers did not directly blame his co-accused for cutting down the tree, although it was heavily implied.
The most striking moment of Carruthers' evidence came when he was asked why he and his friend had been sharing messages about the media coverage of the felling of the tree.
Carruther said: ' It was just a tree, I couldn't understand why everyone was sharing it, every second post was about this tree. I just couldn't get my head round it… it was almost as if someone had been murdered.'
In his closing speech to the jurors, Mr Wright said the two men, who were once so close, had 'fallen out spectacularly'.
He added: 'They are however reunited in this courtroom by one thing, that is the basic lack of courage to own up to what they did.'
The jury deliberated for just over five hours to find both men guilty.