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A jury has been shown footage of what prosecutors say is the moment the Sycamore Gap tree crashed to the ground after being felled by a shadowy figure wielding a loud, revving chainsaw.
A court heard that the video was taken on the Apple iPhone 13 of Daniel Graham, one of two men accused of illegally cutting down the tree on Hadrian’s Wall, described by one witness as “totemic”.
The video lasts 2 minutes and 40 seconds. It shows a silhouetted figure with a chainsaw cutting into a tree. Loud chainsaw noise can be heard as well as the sound and sight of the tree toppling to the ground.
Graham, 39, and Adam Carruthers, 32, have denied being responsible for cutting down the tree, which had stood in a dip on the wall since the late 19th century. They also deny criminally damaging Hadrian’s Wall.
On Wednesday Amy Sutherland, an intelligence analyst for Northumbria police, was asked about the evidence she had collated in order to produce a timeline of events.
Sutherland told the court the tree-felling video was in the downloads on Graham’s phone and she had been able to get the coordinates of where it was filmed from the metadata. She said the coordinates were for Sycamore Gap.
The jury was shown two sets of footage, said to have been filmed in the early hours of 28 September 2023. The first was almost completely black, raw footage. The second had been enhanced by police to change the brightness and contrast.
Jurors at Newcastle crown court were also shown CCTV footage of a car, said by the prosecution to be Graham’s black Range Rover, being driven towards a car park near the Sycamore Gap tree. They were also shown footage of it being driven away from the car park.
Earlier the court was read a written statement from an inspector of ancient monuments, Lee McFarlane, who said some of the stones on Hadrian’s Wall were damaged by the falling tree.
She said it was fortunate the tree was still in full leaf as the crown of the tree appeared to have acted as a kind of “cushion”. The damage could have been “catastrophic” otherwise, she added.
A statement by Tony Wilmott, a senior archaeologist with Historic England, said the Sycamore Gap name was coined in the 1980s and over the decades it had become one of Northumberland’s most appreciated features.
“Its unmistakable profile has been repeated in many media and because of this it has become totemic,” he said.
“It has become a place of marriage proposals, family visits and even the location of ashes to be spread. The place is much loved by many thousands of people.”
Also read out was evidence from Alice Whysall Price, a walker who took pictures of the tree at 5.20pm on 27 September, some of the last to be taken when the tree was still standing.
Opening the case, Wright said Carruthers and Graham embarked on a “moronic mission” to cut down in minutes a tree that had stood for more than 100 years.
He said the two men appeared to revel in the news coverage, which soon began once it was known the tree was felled. Messages talked about it going “wild” and “viral”.
Wright told jurors: “They are loving it, they’re revelling in it. This is the reaction of the people that did it. They still think it’s funny, or clever, or big.”
Graham, of Carlisle, and Carruthers, of Wigton, are jointly charged with causing criminal damage worth £622,191 to the tree. They are also charged with causing £1,144 of damage to Hadrian’s Wall, a Unesco world heritage site. The wall and the tree belong to the National Trust.
Graham and Carruthers deny all the charges against them.
The trial continues.
