The tree stood for nearly 150 years before the two men carried out what a prosecutor called a “moronic mission” and cut it down in the middle of the night.

One of the men who chopped down the Sycamore Gap tree has revealed he cut it down in an act of “drunken stupidity”. Daniel Graham, 39, and Adam Carruthers, 32, were convicted of causing criminal damage to the tree and Hadrian’s Wall, which was marred when the 150-year-old tree fell on it.

LONDON — With one man holding a phone to record the tree’s notorious fall and the other working a chainsaw, a pair of vandals forever altered the landscape of a beloved section of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England. In less than three minutes, the beloved Sycamore Gap tree that had stood nearly 150 years crashed to the ground.