Out of our tree

The video wasn’t very professionally done. It was shot in the dark without lighting, so really it was more an audio record than a visual one. Even when police techies enhanced it you still couldn’t make out much more than grey blobs — perhaps a man, perhaps a tree. But the soundtrack told the story: the noise of a chainsaw idling, then cutting, and idling then cutting again. Then the sound of a crack followed by a loud crash. Then silence except for the roaring wind. 

The blurry figure in that footage and the man who filmed it were, respectively, Adam Carruthers and Daniel Graham. As they drove away from Northumberland towards Cumbria in an old Range Rover shortly after midnight on 28 September 2023, the man who later prosecuted them would note that at this moment they were then the only two people in the world who knew that the famous tree at Sycamore Gap on Hadrian’s Wall had been chopped down.

It was an act of vandalism rather than a murder but would nevertheless be the most notorious folie à deux of the decade. The pair have never said why they did it. 

Trying to answer this question is central to journalist Andrew Hankinson’s forensic examination of the case. Felled captures two men on the margins. They both live in caravans. Apart from each other they have few if any friends. 

But their friendship is intense — one gets the impression that they were closer to each other than either are with their respective “birds”, as Graham calls women. Yet he bristles in fury at even a hint that they might be “pootfahs”. Indeed these misanthropes seem to have warmed up for their tree caper by harassing random gay men in laybys, we learn. 

Graham’s only visible sentimentality is towards that Range Rover, which had been his Dad’s. Caruthers’ sole emotional outlet seems to come from helping other people fix things. 

In court Graham is abrasive. When asked by the prosecutor if he had been excited by the enormous media coverage of the episode, he replies deadpan: “Do I look excited?” In contrast Caruthers seems completely out of his depth — in the witness box his answers make no sense. 

The third principal player in Felled is the author himself. From the beginning it’s clear that for Hankinson this is personal. The tree is where he proposed to his wife. It’s the backdrop of family photographs hanging in his home. 

So, Hankinson starts out outraged by what the pair had done. But gradually he comes to increasingly identify with both men, particularly Graham, who blurts out from the witness box a fact that might inform his actions: “Me Dad hung himself”. 

Graham had attempted suicide himself several times. One woman, who knew Graham during a troubled childhood, says she hopes the Sycamore Gap case might make people “consider the lives of those on the edge of everything”.

It is an irony that despite being socially isolated, Caruthers and Graham still manage to be tripped up by a social acquaintance: it is a tip off from an unnamed third party which undoes them. Without this, it seems unlikely that the police would ever have caught the pair. Later Graham tries to inform on Caruthers to save himself. Their friendship is another casualty of the affair. 

Hankinson meanwhile recalls seeing the film that made the tree so famous, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), as a child, at the Metrocentre in Gateshead — which his father had helped to build — on a family day out.

“Everything about the memory feels good,” Hankinson writes. “It felt back then like England was moving forwards.”

But his father’s construction company goes bust soon afterwards. Then he has a stroke. Around the time of the tree felling, not long after Graham’s dad’s suicide, he too dies. 

Hankinson, already struggling financially, now can’t cope emotionally. 

In the book’s back page blurb Hankinson is described as “an award-winning”’ and eminent author. But the way he tells it on the pages within is rather different. He’s a “shit journalist” and also a bad parent and a failed husband, themes he explores in some detail.

In a sense it’s difficult to argue with his professional self-diagnosis. Because for all that he tries at exhaustive length to speak to the people involved and to visit the places connected with the case, he picks up almost nothing that isn’t served up in open court. 

Felled in this respect is the antithesis of the big hit book in the true crime genre this year, Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling: the latter uncovers twist after twist, the former doesn’t uncover anything at all.

But if Hankinson is a shit news journalist, he’s a haunting long-form feature writer. 

The whole piece is an eerie and compelling telling of how these two misfit loners with a chainsaw — as well as the author trying to understand them — are both a little lost. More widely, Hankinson seems to suggest, an entire nation seems increasingly lost too. 

As the two men’s trial progresses, Hankinon’s anger at their crime begins to dissipate and instead becomes mystification. It was only a tree, he comes to realise, and the national hysteria, in which he himself had participated, was disproportionate. This aspect reminds him of the death of Princess Diana. “A maple in the wind”, he jokes. He despairs of mawkish plans to formally commemorate the tree, rather than just leave a wild memory.  

The National Trust is even invited to submit a victim impact statement to the court to be taken into account at sentencing as if it had been a murder after all. Hankinson responds: “Do you ever feel like the country’s becoming one big psychiatric hospital where we’re all expected to speak in hushed voices…?”

The phrase “Sycamore Gap” was only coined in the mid-eighties, he discovers. It wasn’t marked on maps or widely known until Robin Hood dropped by. And then it was famous — and that made it a target. “None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for the film,” Hankinson realises.

After denying their involvement throughout, despite a weight of forensic, video, telephone tracking and WhatsApp messaging evidence, both Caruthers and Graham only finally admit their crime after they have been found guilty. But even then there is no explanation. 

The closest we get to one is Carruthers blaming having glugged a whole bottle of whisky that night. The judge in sentencing rejects even this, deciding that he couldn’t have managed to cut the tree down so efficiently if he had been drunk. 

The pair may have only thought up the plan on the evening they carried it out, we learn, in which case they cannot have even thought through the potential consequences before enacting it

One is finally left with the impression the Carruthers and Graham could not articulate a reason even if they wanted to. They don’t actually know why they chopped the tree down.