Sycamore Gap Tree: What Happened and What's There Now

The Sycamore Gap tree grew in a dip beside Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland, England. Two men cut it down with a chainsaw on the night of 27–28 September 2023. The stump survived. It is sprouting again, and the trunk now stands indoors in a museum two miles away.

This page sets out what the tree was, exactly where it stood, who felled it, what the courts decided, and what you will actually find at the site today. Several of the claims that circulate online about this tree are wrong, including the date of the felling, so every fact below is attributed.

The short version

• Species: Acer pseudoplatanus — sycamore maple. A maple, not a plane tree.
• Location: a glacial dip in the Whin Sill crags beside Hadrian's Wall, between Milecastle 39 and Crag Lough, about 2 miles west of Housesteads Roman Fort.
• Height when felled: roughly 15 m (49 ft).
• Felled: early hours of 28 September 2023, with a chainsaw, in a single cut, during a storm.
• Convicted: Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers, 9 May 2025, Newcastle Crown Court.
• Sentenced: 15 July 2025, four years and three months each.
• Now: the stump is alive and has thrown up shoots for a third consecutive growing season, confirmed by the National Trust in May 2026.

The species problem: a British sycamore is a maple

This is the single most common confusion about the Sycamore Gap tree, and it matters if you are trying to identify one or grow one.

In Britain, "sycamore" means Acer pseudoplatanus, the sycamore maple. It is a maple. Its seeds are paired samaras — the winged "helicopters" children throw in the air — and the Sycamore Gap tree produced them by the thousand. It is not native to Britain; it was introduced centuries ago and spreads freely.

In North America, "sycamore" means something completely different: Platanus occidentalis, the American sycamore, a plane tree with mottled, peeling white bark. It is not a maple, it is not related to Acer, and it does not make helicopters. Its seeds sit in round, spiky balls that hang from the twigs and break apart in spring.

So the tree at Hadrian's Wall was a maple, and the tree on an Ohio riverbank is a plane. If you want the full comparison, see our guides to sycamore versus maple and the American sycamore. The third member of the muddle, the London plane, is covered in sycamore versus London plane.

Where the tree actually stood

The tree did not overlook the River Tyne, despite what many pages claim. It stood well inland, high on the crags.

This stretch of Hadrian's Wall runs along the lip of the Whin Sill, a hard sheet of dolerite that forms a line of north-facing cliffs across Northumberland. Meltwater from the last glaciation cut several sharp notches through that ridge. The tree grew in one of those notches, with the cliff and the Roman wall climbing steeply on both sides — which is why photographs of it look symmetrical and staged when they are not.

The precise position: between Milecastle 39 and Crag Lough, roughly 2 miles (3 km) west of Housesteads Roman Fort, inside Northumberland National Park. It was visible from the B6318 Military Road. The land and the wall are owned by the National Trust.

The gap itself was unnamed until a National Trust employee, Lawrence Hewer, supplied "Sycamore Gap" when Ordnance Survey remapped the area and asked what the spot was called. The name came from the tree, not the other way round.

Who planted it, and how old was it

Here the honest answer is a range, not a number.

The National Trust attributes the planting to John Clayton (1792–1890), a Newcastle town clerk and lawyer who owned this stretch of the wall, excavated it for nearly fifty years, and bought up five Roman forts and around 20 miles of the wall to stop local builders quarrying the stone. On that account the tree was set as a landscape feature in the late nineteenth century, making it around 150 years old when it fell.

The archaeological evidence complicates that. The antiquary John Hodgson sketched a tree standing in the gap on 18 October 1832, and Ordnance Survey maps show an enclosure around a tree there by the 1860s — both earlier than a "late nineteenth century" planting by Clayton. Archaeologist Jim Crow set this out in The Past in October 2023.

Meanwhile, BBC Newsround reported in September 2025 that experts examining the wood put the tree at at least 100 years old, and the National Trust's own fundraising pages describe it as a landmark "for nearly 200 years."

So: somewhere between about 100 and 200 years, most likely 130–160, with the Clayton attribution treated as strong tradition rather than a documented planting record. Anyone who gives you a single confident year is guessing.

How it became famous

The tree appears in a key scene near the beginning of the 1991 Kevin Costner film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which is where the nickname "the Robin Hood tree" comes from. The geography is nonsense — Sycamore Gap is about 170 miles from Sherwood Forest — but the shot stuck. It also featured in the music video for Bryan Adams' "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You," on heavy rotation on Top of the Pops that year, and later in the ITV drama Vera.

In 2016 it won England's Tree of the Year, run by the Woodland Trust. It was picked from around 200 entries for a shortlist of ten and took 2,542 of 11,913 votes. The prize was a £1,000 care grant funded by the People's Postcode Lottery, and it was spent on a health survey and on protecting the roots, which were being exposed by the sheer volume of feet walking over them. The following year it came fifth of sixteen in European Tree of the Year with 7,123 votes.

One footnote worth knowing: on 30 May 2003 a helicopter filming British Isles – A Natural History crashed about 30 metres from the tree, narrowly missing presenter Alan Titchmarsh. Four people on board were lightly injured. The tree was untouched.

A figure of "300,000 visitors a year" is widely repeated for this site. We have not been able to trace it to any visitor survey, and we have dropped it. What is documented is that the Newcastle Chronicle and others described it as arguably the most photographed tree in Britain, and the spot as possibly the most photographed point in Northumberland National Park.

The felling, 27–28 September 2023

Graham and Carruthers drove roughly 40 miles from the Carlisle area on the evening of 27 September 2023. In the early hours of 28 September, one of them cut the tree down with a chainsaw while the other filmed it on a mobile phone. A storm was blowing, and the wind covered the noise of the saw.

The tree came down backwards onto Hadrian's Wall, damaging a section of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The felling took under three minutes. The men took a wedge of the trunk away as a trophy; neither the wedge nor the chainsaw has ever been recovered.

It was not "severely damaged." It was felled completely, in one cut.

Timeline

The trial and the sentences

The case ran at Newcastle Crown Court in spring 2025. On 9 May 2025 a jury took a little over five hours across two days to convict both men unanimously on two counts of criminal damage each.

The valuations put before the court were precise: £622,191 of damage to the tree and £1,144 to Hadrian's Wall. Both are owned by the National Trust. The prosecution called it a "moronic mission."

On 15 July 2025, Mrs Justice Christina Lambert sentenced Daniel Graham, then 39, of Millbeck Stables near Carlisle, and Adam Carruthers, then 32, of Church Street, Wigton, to four years and three months each for the tree, with a concurrent six months for the wall. She found them equally culpable, described a high degree of premeditation, and said the crime showed "sheer bravado." She told them they would serve no more than 40% of the sentence.

No motive was ever established at trial. After conviction, Carruthers told probation officers that he had held the chainsaw and Graham had filmed him.

What has happened since: ITV News Tyne Tees revealed on 15 April 2026 that Carruthers had been released the previous month, after about ten months inside, under the government's Home Detention Curfew scheme. He wears an electronic tag and must spend nine to twelve hours a day at a registered address. The decision was taken by his prison governor after a risk assessment. Under the 40% rule he would otherwise have been released in January 2027. Graham was still in prison at the time of that report.

Is the tree growing back?

Yes — as a coppice stool, not as the tree that was lost.

Sycamore maple regenerates readily from a cut stump, and this one did. Shoots first appeared at the base in August 2024. The National Trust has counted 25 shoots around the stump, and confirmed in May 2026 that shoots were regrowing for a third consecutive year.

The plan is deliberately slow: leave every shoot alone for several years, watch how they develop, then decide whether to manage the result as a multi-stemmed coppice stool or reduce it to a single leader. National Trust staff estimated at the time of the felling that it would take 150 to 200 years to approach what was there before.

The regrowth is fragile, and the threat now is affection rather than malice. People kept leaving stones, notes and tributes on the stump, so in October 2025 a fence and a netting cage went up over it. If you visit, stay off the soil and do not touch the shoots — compaction of the root zone is the main risk.

Where the wood went

The largest surviving section of the trunk is on permanent display at The Sill: National Landscape Discovery Centre at Bardon Mill, about two miles from where it grew. The installation, Sycamore Gap: Coming Home, opened to the public on 11 July 2025. It is free.

The six-foot section stands upright, as the tree did, ringed by three oak benches from which steam-bent timber rises to form a canopy shaped like a sycamore leaf. The work is by artist Charlie Whinney with the Creative Communities CIC collective, commissioned by Northumberland National Park Authority. Visitors asked to be allowed to touch the wood, and they can.

Smaller pieces went elsewhere — the Twice Brewed Inn near the site keeps a slice of it.

The rest of the seasoned timber has a future. On 23 May 2026 the National Trust announced that Helix Arts and George King Architects had won the Sycamore Gap wood commission with a proposal called The People's Tree, chosen from six shortlisted teams by a national public vote and a judging panel. It involves scanning the tree's rings to generate a soundtrack, collecting recorded reflections from people across the UK, and ending in a sound sculpture containing a time capsule, sited somewhere along Hadrian's Wall. Public participation starts in summer 2026; completion is expected by September 2027.

The tree also reappeared on screen in 2025, digitally recreated for the film 28 Years Later.

Trees of Hope: the 49 saplings

The National Trust collected seed and cuttings from the felled tree and grew them on at its Plant Conservation Centre. In September 2024 it launched Trees of Hope: 49 saplings, one for each foot of the tree's height when it fell, given to communities across the UK.

Nearly 500 applications came in. The saplings, 4 to 6 feet tall, went to publicly accessible sites, including the Rob Burrow Centre for Motor Neurone Disease in Leeds and projects in Northumberland and Coventry. The first were planted in November 2025 to open National Tree Week. Separately, King Charles III was given one of the first seedlings in May 2024, destined for Windsor Great Park.

If you are interested in why one tree could generate this scale of public response, our piece on sycamore tree symbolism covers the older meanings people attach to this genus.

Visiting Sycamore Gap today

The site is open, free and reached on foot. Most walkers start from the Steel Rigg car park and follow the Hadrian's Wall Path east; the gap is a short, steep walk away. It is also reachable from Housesteads to the east.

What you will see is a fenced stump with netting over it, green shoots inside, and the wall running up both sides of the notch. It is quieter than it was, and the ground has begun to recover from the foot traffic that used to expose the roots.

Three practical points. The ground is uneven and there is no shelter; check the forecast, because weather on the crags turns fast. Keep to the path — the erosion around this spot was a live conservation problem long before the felling. And do not step onto the bare soil around the stump, whatever anyone else is doing.

Questions people still ask

Will the same tree grow back? The same root system will. The shape will not. A coppiced stool produces several stems rather than one trunk, so even a successful recovery will look different from the silhouette in the photographs.

Can I take a cutting or a seed from the site? No. The stump is fenced, the shoots are protected, and removing material from a National Trust site without permission is not allowed. Sycamore maple is common across Britain and seeds freely if you want to grow one.

Is the wood for sale? No. The salvaged timber is being used for the memorial installation at The Sill and for the commissioned artwork; it has not been sold commercially. Anything advertised online as "Sycamore Gap wood" should be treated with suspicion.

Why did they do it? Nobody knows. No motive was established at trial. The judge concluded it was bravado, and that the pair had enjoyed the outrage that followed.

Is the site still called Sycamore Gap? Yes. The name is on the Ordnance Survey maps and it has not changed.

Sources

• National Trust — statement on the felling; "Next steps for the Sycamore Gap tree"; Trees of Hope; Sycamore Gap wood commission announcement, 23 May 2026.
• Crown Prosecution Service — "Pair who felled tree at Sycamore Gap convicted of criminal damage" and "Pair who felled Sycamore Gap tree jailed."
• ITV News Tyne Tees — sentencing report, 15 July 2025; "Adam Carruthers who felled Sycamore Gap tree released from prison," 15 April 2026.
• BBC News — regrowth and trial coverage, 2023–2026; BBC Newsround on the tree's age, 4 September 2025.
• The Guardian — felling and wall-damage reporting, September–October 2023.
• Jim Crow, "The tale of a tree: an archaeological history of Sycamore Gap on Hadrian's Wall," The Past, 31 October 2023.
• Northumberland National Park Authority and The Sill — Sycamore Gap: Coming Home.