A man accused of felling the Sycamore Gap tree on Hadrian’s Wall told police he was being “stitched up” and did not have the skills to do it.
A jury at Newcastle crown court heard police interviews with Daniel Graham, 39, in which he also said he had no idea what he was doing on the night the tree was felled, which took place a month earlier.
Graham and Adam Carruthers, 32, have denied charges of criminally damaging the famous tree and the Roman wall it stood on.
Prosecutors have alleged the pair travelled from Carlisle to Northumberland on a “moronic mission” to cut down the tree during Storm Agnes. They are alleged to have driven there in Graham’s black Range Rover on the evening of 27 September 2023.
They have been accused of filming on an iPhone the cutting down of the tree with a chainsaw in the early hours of 28 September.
The prosecution claims the two men took a wedge of the trunk as a trophy and later “revelled” in the headlines nationally and internationally about the loss of the tree .
Graham was first interviewed by police on suspicion of criminal damage on 31 October.
On day three of the trial, DI Calum Meikle of Northumbria police and a prosecuting barrister, Rebecca Brown, read out transcripts of interviews in which Graham denied having anything to do with felling the tree.
He told police he thought he was being “fixed up” and mentioned a “fake profile” and a “pikey down the road” when asked with whom he was in dispute.
Graham, a groundworker, said he was being “stitched up” and he knew who was accusing him. “It’s nowt to do with me and I don’t know who’s done it, but I know who’s put my name forward. I know who’s made the allegation … I know who’s done this to me.”
He said he was being framed for the crime as part of a dispute with someone “stirring the pot”. Graham said he allowed other people to use his Range Rover.
Asked if any of the chainsaws he owned could be linked to cutting down the sycamore, Graham told police: “They wouldn’t be big enough.” He said he did not have the skills to fell such a large tree.
Asked how he would cut down the tree at Sycamore Gap, he replied: “I have never done a large fell, I haven’t been trained for that.”
Graham told police he did not remember sending Carruthers a message saying “here we go” the morning after the tree was felled as the media picked up on the story.
He replied “no comment” when he was asked who had cut the tree down and if there was a reason for it.
Interviews with Carruthers were also read to the jury. He said he could not remember what he was doing on the night the tree was felled but there was a “good chance” he was at home looking after his new baby.
Carruthers told police he had never felled a tree and thought chainsaws were “nasty things”, adding that he would rather “stick with spanners”.
He said: “If someone said ‘there’s a tree and there’s a saw, cut that down’, I’d have a go but I’ve never done it.”
The court heard that police had never recovered the wedge of the tree said to have been taken as a trophy, or the chainsaw used to topple the sycamore.
Graham, of Carlisle, and Carruthers, of Wigton, are jointly charged with causing criminal damage worth £622,191 to the tree. They are also charged with causing £1,144 of damage to Hadrian’s Wall, a Unesco world heritage site. The wall and the tree belong to the National Trust.
The pair deny all the charges against them. The trial continues.