A police investigation has been launched into the felling of one of the most photographed trees in the UK, the Sycamore Gap tree at Hadrian’s Wall, Northumberland, which was found cut down on Thursday morning.
The world famous tree, voted English tree of the year in a Woodland Trust competition in 2016 and featured in the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, is thought to have been deliberately felled.
Photographs taken on Thursday morning show it appears to have been sawed at the base of the trunk with a chainsaw. The sycamore tree, estimated to be several hundred years old, had previously stood in a small picturesque valley in Northumberland national park in the north of England.