Felled

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 Hadrian’s 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 not have the chance to compete on a level playing field; and how society was quick to condemn them when they were charged with felling the tree. It is a story about collective grief and outrage and of what we prioritise in our stories of loss and punishment. It examines the wider reaction to the felling by the British public and asks, concurrently, whether society – all of us – did enough to give these two men hope. Andrew Hankinson is an award-winning writer and the author of You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat], which won the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction and was recently used for a production at the Royal Court, with Andrew as artistic adviser. His journalism has appeared in the New Yorker, The Sunday Times, FT, the Guardian, the Telegraph, GQ, Esquire, the Spectator and Wired. He was the only journalist to attend every day of the trial and sentencing of Graham and Carruthers.