Step inside The Twice Brewed Inn, and you’re greeted by a large photographic print. It shows imposing dolerite crags, formed hundreds of millions of years ago, with Roman fortifications running along the top. This, manager Steve Blair says, is the “Barbarian’s View” of Hadrian’s Wall. “Getting any barbarians up there would be tricky,” he adds.
Blair describes the landscape to me, but falters half way along, searching for a way to articulate an absence. “And then, of course, that’s where the Sycamore Gap was.” He corrects himself: “Well, the Sycamore Gap is still there — but that’s where the tree was.”
A gap where the gap used to be.
The photograph was taken after the sycamore was cut down on the night of 27 September, 2023. Which makes the entrance one of the few places in the pub, its gardens, the adjoining brewery and shop where you can’t see an image of the tree.
The felling is discussed in tones the Romans might have saved for those beyond the wall, outside of their society: inconceivable, mysterious, barbaric. What could possibly motivate someone to trek to the middle of nowhere, in the teeth of Storm Agnes, hauling a chainsaw up a steep escarpment in the dark? To commit such a nihilistic, seemingly futile violation of the landscape, the local culture and people’s innocent pleasure?
“We still can’t comprehend it,” says Stef Dillon, who works in the brewery’s tap room. “That somebody could do something so destructive… We can't empathise or identify with someone who would do that.”
Eighteen months on, “Why?” is still the question asked of the pub’s employees every day. Or as I heard a local journalist put it bluntly to one of the accused following his hearing last year: “Why did you do it, mate?” Like The Twice Brewed’s customers, he seemed more to be voicing his bafflement than expecting an answer.
Next week, Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers, two men in their 30s from neighbouring Cumbria, will go on trial for criminal damage to the tree and Hadrian’s Wall totalling £623,335. Both of the accused have pleaded not guilty. Whatever transpires, the felling has consequences beyond the criminal. The Twice Brewed Inn has, for years, been a destination in itself. Customers come while walking the wall, or visiting The Sill next door: a £14.8 million visitor’s centre and museum about the British landscape, built to frame what was once a perfect view of the Sycamore Gap.
The tree’s fame rose alongside the pub’s own transformation. When Blair first came to work here in 2004, 30 employees ran the pub, kitchen and guest accommodation. By the time he returned in 2019, after a six-year hiatus, the new ownership had added a brewery, tap house, planetarium and star-gazing cabins. People visited the Sycamore Gap every day. Photographers stayed overnight to capture the tree at sunset and sunrise. The inn was serving 5,000 customers a week. Today, it employs 70. And an image of the tree features on everything.
“It used to be on my truck,” says Blair. “I’d love driving off somewhere, and I could be in the Lake District, or the Cairngorms, and people would photograph my truck and go, Twice Brewed Inn!” His pickup bears no sign now.
Blair, 53, is a big man with tattoos up his arms and a gentle voice. It’s a frosty morning when we speak, but he’s clothed in shorts and a t-shirt after a session with his trainer. His staff, though, wear a navy uniform bearing the Sycamore Gap insignia.
When I first heard about the felling, waking like many across the North East to incredulous WhatsApp chats, I wondered about the ecosystem of businesses around the tree, which had fed and watered my friends and I as we walked the wall. While they were not entirely dependent on Sycamore Gap, they had written it into their story. How would they weather the loss? As Blair told Newcastle’s The Chronicle at the time: “It'll have a big impact on the day trippers and people coming to see Sycamore Gap.”
“We have a lot of people who will literally just come for a walk to go and see the tree,” says Michelle Gregory, who works front of house. “You've got the walking companies. Visitors from abroad. A big part of them stopping here is because they want to see the tree.” With her two children, who also work at the inn, she lives close enough to see Sycamore Gap from her front window, and hear walkers’ conversations along the wall. The only thing that could have stopped them hearing the chainsaw that night was the storm.
There is a tight-knit, family feel to The Twice Brewed. The staff are immediate locals, or from surrounding towns and villages. Whole families are spread around the sections. Blair’s wife, Zara, is on reception. His son works the bar on Saturdays. His sister is a kitchen porter. Three brothers from a few miles up the road, all named after Formula One drivers, work front of house.
Red Kellie, who founded the next-door brewery in 2017, tells me she worries about all the local businesses, including campsites and B&Bs, that have built the tree into their ethos. Two nearby primary schools use it as their logo. Her son goes to one.
Confusingly, the hamlet of Twice Brewed is also known as Once Brewed, depending on whether you arrive from the east or west. While there are competing legends about its name, actual archeological evidence confirms its ancient brewing culture. The first brewer named in British records, a Belgian called Atrectus, supplied the original frontier fort Vindolanda, just a mile south around AD89 — a good 30 years before Emperor Hadrian signed off on his wall.
The Twice Brewed Brewery only opened in 2017, but a public house has stood here since at least the 18th Century. “A more dreary country… can scarcely be conceived,” wrote William Hutton, the first historian of Birmingham, who crossed this stretch of wall in 1801. The septuagenarian stopped at The Twice Brewed Inn, where he was first offered the chance to share a bed with a sickly traveller or a ten-year-old boy. He secured one to himself in the end.
As Hutton passed the Sycamore Gap the following morning, the tree would have only been a sapling — if that. Its earliest known depiction is dated 1832, buried in the unpublished journals of Northumbrian antiquary John Hodgson. His sketch shows a young tree surrounded by a stone enclosure — much like the fence now built around the stump, protecting it from sheep, deer and further human vandalism. The archaeologist Jim Crow, who excavated this section of the wall in 1982, suggests it may have been planted in around 1787.
The name came during a 1970s Ordinance Survey, when the National Trust’s head ranger came up with “Sycamore Gap” on the fly. It didn’t catch on immediately. For years, staff at The Twice Brewed gave directions to “that tree in the dip” or “Robin Hood’s tree” — a reference to its appearance alongside Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991).
The European sycamore is a strange choice to evoke an ancient, romanticised Merry England. Acer pseudoplatanus is thought not to have reached the British Isles by the time of the Crusades, when the film is set. During one central scene, the tree’s boughs provide safe harbour for a young boy accused of poaching deer. Then, in an uncanny moment that makes you wince slightly now, one of the Sheriff of Nottingham’s thugs begins to chop it down.
Matt Brown, head brewer at The Twice Brewed, was born in the mid-1980s, four miles away in Haltwhistle. Well placed, therefore, to witness a boom in the tree’s popularity after the film. But that’s not his experience. “People go, oh did you go visit Sycamore Gap as a kid?” he told me. “No. Because it wasn't really a thing.” In his memory, the tree’s increasing fame was gradual — the result of the Hadrian’s Wall Path being completed in 2003, and the rise of digital photography and social media.
Brown explains his theory: “Hadrian's Wall is really cool to visit, but it’s hard to photograph. If you get your picture taken on a family walk, just standing in front of the wall, it doesn't look that impressive.” But the tree — framed by the wall, perfectly symmetrical in its dip — is photogenic. And the walk is manageable. “It’s about a mile along the most dramatic, visually stunning part of Hadrian's wall,” he adds.
In 2016, the Woodland Trust named the sycamore England’s “Tree of the Year”. Locals describe it as “the most photographed trees in the northern hemisphere” — though it’s unclear what kind of tech could prove that. Regardless, by the time Steve Blair returned to manage The Twice Brewed Inn in 2019, he was serving people from Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. All came to see and photograph the tree.
As the tree became a local icon, it was increasingly woven into the brand — and the expansion — of nearby businesses. When Reuben Straker bought The Twice Brewed Inn in 2014, he approached Red Kellie about setting up an on-site brewery. It would supply his group of pubs, and eventually reach further afield. From the start, the vision was clear: the brewery would have close ties with the tree. The inn had recently adopted a new logo featuring Sycamore Gap, and the brewery would follow suit.
For its first beers, Straker knew one should have branding based on the tree, with others alluding to the area’s Roman history and landmarks. For the very first brew, they needed a crowd-pleaser. “An easy-drinking, sessionable IPA that aims to appeal to as many people as possible,” says Brown, now head brewer. They called it “Sycamore Gap.”
“That was the landmark closest to everyone's hearts at the pub,” Kellie told me. And the pale ale remains their most popular beer. Of the 40,000 pints of real ale the inn serves a year, half are Sycamore.
The tree had made its mark elsewhere, too. In 2015, Alan Phillipson bought a near-derelict, Grade II-listed pub in Hexham — The Heart of All England — and renamed it The Heart of Northumberland. To capture the spirit of the name, he chose a likeness of the Sycamore Gap tree for its sign and branding. A few years later, when rural retail and leisure group WCF acquired the Herding Hill Farm campsite just outside Haltwhistle, they rebranded using the tree as their logo. Glampers there can now stay in the Sycamore Gap Wigwam — complete with hot tub.
As a tourism emblem, the tree works perfectly. Flash a glimpse of Sycamore Gap, and everyone knows you're talking about Northumberland. Meanwhile, tucked away in a corner of the Twice Brewed’s beer garden, a black wooden board is mounted on the wall. After Blair’s return in 2019, his son found the pub’s old sign at a car boot sale, and he rescued it. “The only sign to look for on Hadrian's Wall,” it reads, as a beplumed Roman charioteer whips his horses.
There had been prophecies about this eventuality. “Weirdly, we had wondered, imagine if the tree came down,” says Brown. “We presumed it would be a storm, but in the distant future. We didn’t think it would be now.”
He was one of the first on the scene that morning. A colleague showed him a picture of the gap when he got into work. He initially took it for a joke. Then he put on his running shoes and went to see for himself. The night had been windy — but the tree had survived worse. The clean cut came as a shock. Brown took photos of what he found and posted them on the brewery’s social media. In these images, you can see heart-shaped paper cut-outs and painted stones, left by recent pilgrims while the tree still stood. “By the time I ran back here — bear in mind it's only just over a mile — reception were already saying there were messages for me from journalists wanting to use my picture.”
Then, in his signature brew of direct humour, Brown adds: “Probably should have put a picture of the beer on at the same time, shouldn’t I?”
At the pub, the staff had some wild ideas in those first few days. One involved altering the branding there and then. “My dad’s got Photoshop,” says Brown. “I could have nipped down there and changed the Sycamore Gap pump clip so the tree's on its side. I'm glad I didn't do that. It would have got us into so much crap. But I think you could do it now…”
Initial worries about the impact on trade quickly gave way to a surge of support. “They were very concerned about us locally,” says Stef Dillon. “There was one bloke who said he hadn’t heard of us before, but he knew our business will have been affected. He rang up and just wanted us to pick £200 worth of beer for him.”
The brewery normally sells a pallet of Sycamore Gap bottles a year — 150 cases. After the felling, they shifted three pallets in a month. New customers assumed the beer had been brewed in tribute to the tree, not named after it years earlier. Believing it to be a limited-edition souvenir, they snapped it up.
Samantha Thwaites of Vallum Lodge set up her B&B half a mile away to suit the needs of seasoned hikers, who are less likely to visit just for the day. But she’s had a similar experience as staff at the Twice Brewed. She gets asked about the tree three or four times a day, and guests are still buying what were originally commissioned as Christmas decorations before the tree came down: acrylic etchings of Santa’s sleigh flying over the Gap.
Despite stories I’m told of far-flung visitors — of Kiwi octogenarians paying tribute to loved-ones who never got to see the tree — Brown insists the Sycamore Gap wasn’t well known outside the “bubble” of the North East. “It won Tree of the Year,” says Brown. “But no one follows Tree of the Year.”
And then the tree came down. After the felling, he fielded calls from the Washington Post and the New York Times. But for him, the felling didn’t make the tree more famous — the felling was what made it famous.
What happens, though, when the trial ends, the buzz fades, and all that’s left is the stump?
Even in the early days, younger staff were uniformly optimistic. Still, as manager, it’s Blair’s job to consider the repercussions. “The amount of people who used to come in and ask for directions was relentless.” The Gap was a perfect day out: an easy walk, a picnic spot, just 20 minutes from Newcastle. “When it was cut down, I thought, they'll still come to the wall. But not here.”
Since Blair’s first stint managing the pub, turnover has tripled. But the costs of expansion — more staff, Covid-era conservatories, outdoor pods, gardens, £40,000 laundry bills, telescopes, planetarium domes — means they are exposed to any drop-off. Blair points to the Gilsland Spa, a historic hotel three miles away that used to be the “jewel” of the area. “It would have functions all the time. Now it's just wrack and ruin.”
For now, though, things are stable — though sales of their signature pale have settled back to what they were before the tree came down. That may soon change: it has just been announced that Sycamore Gap will be stocked in Sainsbury’s.
After attending the first hearing for the accused last May, I posted on X about the £622,191 value placed on the Sycamore Gap tree by the prosecution, and the further hearing being set for Crown Court. The news had already been broken elsewhere. But a quirk of the algorithm pushed my post — stray apostrophes and all — above the original reports.
Replies were emotional: one called the crime “treason”; another demanded life sentences be handed down. On the other side, many echoed the sentiment shouted by a man outside the courthouse, as Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers climbed into a taxi in suits, ski masks, and aviator sunglasses, tailed by photographers: “It’s only a fucking tree, you fucking freaks.”
Between those poles, others were mystified by how the case had been processed through a Covid-backlogged system, while more serious offences with human victims often take far longer to reach the Crown Court. Speaking to a contact in the police, I was told that, internally, for the first few weeks, this was considered the biggest crime in the North East.
When it goes to trial later this month, the case for the prosecution will involve cell site analysis, number plate recognition technology and tree DNA. When I asked Historic England for confirmation of the dendrological analysis they had performed to age the tree, they said the information was too sensitive to pass on before the case concludes.
“The number of police that were here when it was cut down was like a murder scene,” says Blair. Meanwhile, actual murders were getting less media coverage. “The sad thing was, the tree got cut down and it was on the front page,” he says. “A girl in London got stabbed to death, and it was on page seven.”
The Sycamore Gap tree didn’t have particular historical or ecological value. Though not classed as invasive, sycamores are often culled to protect native species. Peter Fiennes, in his nature memoir Oak and Ash and Thorn, recalls walking through Ashford Hangers Nature Reserve, where he encountered a notice explaining recent fellings to prevent “Sycamore infestation”.
Instead, the Sycamore Gap tree’s value depends on something else. It is only a tree, but it meant something to people. It was striking, immediate. It emotionally changed the landscape.
On a rainy day last June, a friend and I had lunch at the inn, then walked the mile up to where the sycamore tree had stood. There were still people photographing it. Six or so.
One tourist wearing a red anorak stood in front of the brown stump, enclosed by a brown fence, with his thumbs up for the camera. There was no solemnity. No shift in tone. Just a smile, as if he’d come to see the tree, and it was still there.
Jonathan McAloon is a culture journalist and book critic. He has written for the Financial Times, Irish Times, BBC, Telegraph and Guardian, among others.
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