Dotted along the edge of Hadrian’s Wall, the pretty archetypal English villages of Kirkandrews-on-Eden and Grinsdale are the final stops for walkers and cyclists before the urban sprawl of Carlisle.
There’s no pub, or a shop. There are two village halls. One, now closed, was once a popular dance hall and used by the local young farmers’ club. The other, a single-storey brick building, holds regular coffee mornings and afternoon teas. There used to be a railway with a station, but the unprofitable line shut in the 1960s.
And the villages, with a combined population of around 600 people, would have gone largely unnoticed had it not been for one of their residents cutting down the iconic Sycamore Gap tree on the night of 28 September, 2023.
Daniel Graham was a well-known bully, according to neighbours, who would often spot him riding a horse trap or driving around in his groundworks company lorry.
The local parish council even publicly claimed residents were threatened by his “dominant and oppressive behaviour” in a lengthy planning dispute over his claim for the permanent siting of a caravan in the village.
But they could still not believe what the 39-year-old would do.
Alongside his former best friend Adam Carruthers, Graham travelled during a storm to the dip in Hadrian’s Wall where the Sycamore Gap tree once stood, and it was chopped down with a chainsaw.
On Tuesday, at their sentencing, Justice Lambert said she could now be sure that Carruthers had cut the tree down, while Graham assisted and encouraged him by driving him there.
But it doesn’t matter – both vandals have disgraced the communities in which they lived.
“It’s embarrassing,” one neighbour told The Independent. “That someone from your neighbourhood could have done something so heinous, it’s shameful and upsetting for everyone living here. He was a bully, a difficult person, but to do this? Never.”
Graham was no stranger to local police, say locals, who often spotted marked cars outside the entrance gates. It has emerged he had convictions for violence and battery between 2007 and 2016 and for Public Order Act offences between 2021 and 2022.
He also had a caution for stealing logs, which he had chopped up with a chainsaw.
It was his criminal activity and Graham’s tree surgery work that perhaps fuelled the immediate rumours that swirled around the village in the wake of the felling, indicating he was responsible
It wasn’t until Northumbria Police received a “strand of intelligence” two weeks later that officers carried out the dawn arrest of Graham at his home.
“Within a couple of days, people were saying it was him,” the neighbour said. “It was a case of waiting for him to be caught, and when he was convicted at the trial, there was a sense of relief, but also embarrassment over his link to the area.”
They added: “But no one knows why he did it, do they? We heard it was a bet. Either he lost a bet or someone made a bet with him to chop the tree down. The problem is no one will ever really know, will they?”
At their sentencing hearing on Tuesday, it emerged that Graham and Carruthers had both now accepted responsibility, but it’s still not known why they did it. The suggestion of a bet only adds to the list of unproven theories put forward, which also includes Carruthers wanting a trophy wedge from the tree as a present for his newborn child.
During the two-week-long trial, Graham had described himself as a “man with no friends”. He said he lived a quiet life, only seeing his co-accused Carruthers and his on-off girlfriend outside of work.
A falling-out with his family at the funeral of his father brought him closer to Carruthers, who helped fix his father’s Land Rover Defender for the ceremony.
Down a track less than half a mile from Graham’s home, a woman living with her parents and children in a caravan said: “He was the type who kept himself to himself in that yard, we really didn’t see much of him.”
More recently, she said her family had a “gripe” with Graham after he told environmental officials they had polluted the river that passed his compound. “He’d been digging across the field and pointed the finger at us,” she said.
“Like everyone round here, we’re really shocked,” she added.
Also nearby, a neighbour remembers when detectives first arrived to arrest Graham and searched his compound. They never found the machine that cut down to the Sycamore Gap, or the wedge of tree that was pictured in his car boot when he returned from the crime.
“He was a ruffian, so it wasn’t a complete surprise when [we] heard about the evidence,” they said.
“No one really knew him, though. You’d see him driving the van, and you’d hear about the developments on the yard he shouldn’t be doing. But no one really went to speak to him. Why would they?”
Graham told the jury that he and Carruthers had “bumped into each other”, before forming the close relationship. But by the summer of 2024, their friendship was teetering under the pressure of evidence put to them by police.
Then, in August, Graham dropped a bombshell when he made a 10-minute 101 call to police, pinning the blame on his friend. “One of the lads, Adam Carruthers, has got the saw back in his possession,” he said.
Turning the screw even further, in December, Graham posted a picture of Carruthers on Facebook.
But Carruthers, despite the finger-pointing from his co-accused, never directly blamed Graham, even when giving evidence in court.
For Carruthers, unlike Graham, neighbours of his parents in the town of Wigton, a 45-minute drive from Graham’s home, said they were shocked to find out the 32-year-old’s involvement.
One neighbour said he was a “silly man with silly ideas”, but admitted his surprise when the case got to court.
The neighbour said: “He liked his cars, he was a mechanic. He was doing alright at one point. He had a job at the factory, but then was caught doing up cars on a day he should have been in. He was an ordinary lad, really.”
In a pub in Wigton, a drinker said he knew Carruthers because he did the MOT on his vehicle twice. “He’s not the bad guy in this,” he said. “He got pushed into this by the other one, Adam was alright.”
Carruthers was living with his partner in a ramshackle yard at an old fuel depot next to RAF Kirkbride airfield at the time of the Sycamore Gap felling. Rusting cars and machinery sit around the gated compound, where dogs guard the entrance.
His partner had given birth less than two weeks before the tree came down.
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It was the prosecution’s case at the trial that Carruthers had kept the wedge from cutting down the tree as a present for the newborn. Graham, when giving evidence, claimed Carruthers had a “fascination” with the tree.
He alleged Carruthers even had a length of string in his workshop, which he used to measure the tree’s circumference and kept for sentimental reasons.
Neither the used chainsaw, wedge of tree or length of string was ever found.
Like the questions on the motive behind the criminal damage, information on the whereabouts of the items look to remain locked up with the pair who were sentenced to four years and three months in prison, as many still mourn the loss of the Sycamore Gap tree.
