Try as he might, Gary Pickles will never forget the morning of October 28, 2023. A call had come in to the ranger’s office from a local farmer: the Sycamore Gap tree, the man had reported, appeared to be down. 

Pickles didn’t think it was a prank; that’s not really the Northumberland farmers’ way. A storm had raged throughout the previous night, battering the wild expanse of northern England in which the 55-year-old had worked, on and off, for 25 years. But it didn’t quite make sense. The tree – solitary, sturdy, sheltered in a dell alongside Hadrian’s Wall – had withstood far greater tempests over the past century and a half as it had branched into popular culture and extended roots deep into the country’s affections. 

Pickles grabbed the keys to his Northumberland National Park 4x4 and drove from his home in Haydon Bridge, around 10 miles from the famous landmark. Part of the sycamore’s allure had always been the purity of the sightline from the Military Road, which runs in parallel with the wall a few hundred yards south: the way the ridge dips into a perfect u-shape, with the ancient Roman stones framing the tree and the land falling away to the north to create an arresting silhouette.

“As I got nearer and nearer I did a quick double take and I just knew,” he says. The veteran ranger instantly recognised that foul play had been involved. “The tree had gone [fallen] north. If it was going to fall over, it would have fallen south,” he says, “as the roots can’t penetrate to the north because of the wall so there’s less anchorage.” Also, he could just about make out an oval of light-coloured wood at the base standing out against the grey of the autumnal morning: the telltale sign of a fresh felling.

“I realised immediately that this was going to be a huge story, that things were going to kick off,” he says. “I felt a dread that I’d be the one having to share the news.”

From the roadside, Pickles made a series of calls to national park contacts. But he told them to hang on before releasing the news; he needed to be sure. Driving up to the Steel Rigg car park, around a mile west of the tree, he jogged his way back along the Hadrian’s Wall Trail that he’d spent years maintaining.

Approaching from this direction, the steeply undulating topography masks the tree until you’re almost upon it. The sight that greeted him as he arrived offered a terrible clarity: the stately tree – perhaps the most photographed in the world – lay prone and askew below, the base of its severed trunk resting on the edge of the now-damaged wall.

Two hikers were there already. One of them was sitting down. She was sobbing.

Pickles shakes his head at the memory. He’s sitting in the cafe of The Sill: National Landscape Discovery Centre, a little over a mile from what is now a horribly literal Sycamore Gap. It’s late July 2025, nearly two years after the felling. But the events of that morning remain vivid. He thinks of the tree, he says, every day.

Through the cafe’s generous windows some of the ranger’s extraordinarily picturesque office is visible: a gently sloping grassed ridge, like the back of an enormous breaker advancing towards the shore of Scotland, its crest itself rising and falling in a series of steep perpendicular waves. Grafted on to this, often at crazy inclines, runs Hadrian’s Wall. Those Romans seldom took the easy route.

If the act – which we’ll come to – was startling, the response was just as much so. It was around 9am when Pickles found the tree. By 10am, local media were reporting the felling and, according to a witness statement presented in the ensuing trial at Newcastle Crown Court, National Trust staff were weeping openly in the central office. National news outlets jumped on the story. By midday, with social media fanning the flames, it was global.

“My brother in America rang me up that evening. Then my sister in France. It became international amazingly quickly,” recalls Pickles. The felling had achieved instant cut-through.