The parable of Sycamore Gap The tree has become a fantasy object

Once upon a time ­­­­­there was a Cumbrian labourer called Adam Carruthers, who wished for a suitable trophy to mark the birth of a baby daughter. His heart was set on extracting a wedge from a famous old sycamore tree, nestling within a dip between escarpments near Hadrian’s Wall. One black September night, he met up with his good friend Daniel Graham, and the pair drove to Northumbria through a storm.

Picture them as corrupted versions of Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee: bewitched by mischievous supernatural forces and on a quest to massacre an Ent. Arriving at the ancient place, Carruthers wields the chainsaw while Graham holds the camera. Around them Storm Agnes shrieks her protests, while the ghosts of Roman centurions gaze impassively on. Jagged steel bites deep into sycamore sap. The canopy teeters, then falls ignominiously to earth. Afterwards, Carruthers takes his wedge back to the baby’s cradle. The child wakes, crying — as does the horrified world. The spell is broken. Gamgee betrays Frodo to the police, and they both get banged up for four years apiece.

This, minus a few flourishes, is the morality tale offered by Channel 4’s new two-part documentary about Sycamore Gap, though it is disguised as a quaintly rural police procedural. Northumbrian pipes drone in the background as a section of the trunk is uncovered on a slab, as if for an autopsy. A commenting detective seems embarrassed to spell things out: “In this case, the victim is … for want of a better word … the tree, really.” The camera lingers over the wounds, unfettered by the usual concern for respecting the decency of the dead.

In happier times, the sycamore had been visually compelling to visitors, partly because it was so solitary. The barren landscape enhanced its numinous dignity, as did the near-symmetry of the steep banks on either side. For years people had made pilgrimages, asked for engagement blessings, fertilised its roots with the ashes of their loved ones. The tree had seemed resilient ­— even invincible — much older than its 130 years. Back in 2003, it had survived a near-extinction event, narrowly avoiding a collision with a BBC helicopter carrying Alan Titchmarsh.

Slumped and surly on hard plastic chairs at the police station, Carruthers and Graham each tried to deny the crime, but the evidence was all there on their phones. There were voice recordings suggesting they revelled in the public attention. There was a wedge of greenwood, photographed in the boot of Graham’s car. There were even what police called “the owl photographs”: pictures of Carruthers grinning idiotically in his workshop, inexplicably holding some baby owls. Behind him were 11 chainsaws. He had told the police he had none.

And of course, there was the video of the act itself. Documentary viewers see it in the second episode. Filmed in the dark, the blurry footage and eerie noises have something of a horror movie. I had to suppress my urge to look away. Afterwards, various locals reflect on camera about how stupid the defendants were to leave a visual record of their crime. They don’t seem to realise that this was surely part of the point.

When the story first hit the national news, Carruthers texted Graham “Here we go”. A detective recalls on camera how she started to wonder: “Is this why they’ve done it? Are they doing this because they want to be famous?” Carruthers seemed much more interested in his nocturnal escapade than in his newborn, despite a tribute to her being the pretext. On the night itself, his partner sent him a film of their daughter feeding. Came the text back: “I’ve got a better video than that.”

Perhaps, then, there was a spell cast upon the pair after all: not so much by Cumbrian boggarts or Northumbrian fairies, ­but rather by the little folk in their phones. Thousands of visual representations of the tree were already in the public domain. It had featured in films, television programmes, pop videos, endless Facebook posts and Instagram reels. In making their mark on this icon, did an envious Carruthers and Graham imagine they were stealing some of the magical aura for themselves? At the trial, Carruthers claimed incomprehension at all the fuss: “It was just a tree.” Still, it was a special enough tree that he felt moved to drive 36 miles in a storm to chop it down.

Apparently, most locals didn’t realise that the sycamore was special either, until, in 1991, it appeared in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. As an elderly resident from the nearby town of Haltwhistle said: “Sycamore Gap was just a tree on Hadrian’s Wall, nobody ever thought about it, talked about it, or nothing, until Kevin Costner came to do the film there … The tree looked absolutely fantastic.” A market developed for mementoes in its image: paintings, jewellery, even tattoos. Said a local publican: “People come into the pub at least a dozen times a day, and they say ‘can you tell me where the tree is, the one that used to be in Robin Hood?’”

Also in the documentary, there are expressions of fury and grief from longstanding and particularly ardent Sycamore Gap-lovers. Many of them seem equally unable to separate the real tree from images of the tree. “I was 100% in mourning” said one man, moved to tears by the loss. Before its demise, he wistfully recalled, “I would post on social media ‘Hey the tree’s looking good today!’ … it would get thousands of reactions.”

In the aftermath of the crime, academics rushed to analyse what precisely had been taken. Why was there quite so much public grief? Some thought it was a violation of a sense of the natural world as “home”. Others concluded that our “need for trees might run deeper than we think”. But I’m afraid this is all too politically convenient. I don’t think the furore was really about the natural world at all, nor even about trees in general. The whole episode can tell you practically nothing about the gorgeous sycamore growing anonymously in the corner of a wood near your house.

The tree in its historic setting of Hadrian’s Wall was certainly a lovely and resonant object. But it was surely its fame in the eyes of others that imbued it with most of the prestige. The more that people made films about it, or took selfies in front of it, the more prestigious and alluring it got. In this sense, the tree was like any sacred object, manmade or natural. New visitors found it particularly meaningful, knowing that lots of other people had previously found it meaningful too.

But equally, the meaning was more profane than this reference to the sacred suggests; for it was mostly tied to imagined admiring gazes from other people. A lot of enjoyment of the tree came from thinking of exotic others — film stars, pop stars, influencers — enjoying it first. In a sense, then, actual deep connection in the here and now was deferred.

It’s hard to get people to care about nature: to turn it from background to foreground. The consensus among relevant English heritage organisations seems to be to lean into social media as a tool for sparking engagement, but I wonder if it doesn’t defeat its own purpose. Not far from me is Birling Gap and the Seven Sisters, where a steady stream of tourists also traipse, bathing in the glow reflected by thousands of previous representations. They take their selfies, eat their picnics, and have a lovely time. But I’m not entirely sure they really look at the cliffs.

Viewed in this light, both the outraged public response and the draconian prison sentence that followed the crime invite a new interpretation. There was criminal damage not only to a living tree, but also to a fantasy object that made people feel specially connected to glamorous others elsewhere. Carruthers and Graham didn’t just chop down a sycamore — they destroyed an infinite number of future selfies. “For me, it’s an attack on the way people live”, reflected the chief police investigator in the documentary. In a sense, he was probably right.

But let us not be too bleak. In an instructive folk tale, there is often a hopeful ending. The hapless woodcutters still languish in prison, thankfully beyond the reach of any early release scheme from the Home Secretary. Twelve green shoots are now reported to be sprouting from the remains of the Sycamore Gap trunk. And most important of all, visitors have started taking dramatic pictures of the stump.