A Tree Was Felled. No One Heard It. How Do You Find Out Who Did It?

Tony Gates was one of the first to hear the bad news. The chief executive of Northumberland National Park, a 400-square-mile swatch of rolling hills and wild moorland on England’s northern edge, he received a phone call early last Thursday informing him that one of the area’s most celebrated landmarks, the tree at Sycamore Gap, was no more.

At first, Mr. Gates was relatively sanguine. The tree had stood for two centuries in a dip roughly halfway along the 80-mile run of Hadrian’s Wall — the northernmost boundary of the Roman Empire at its peak, constructed to distinguish the civilization of England from the barbarism of what is now mostly Scotland.

The tree was iconic in a literal sense: Its silhouette had become a shorthand for the area as a whole, depicted on an array of locally produced gins, beers and cookies. But it was also a living thing, and, as such, it was “finite,” Mr. Gates said.

The previous night, Storm Agnes had whipped across northern England, bringing with it 60-mile-an-hour winds. Mr. Gates assumed the tree, 70 feet tall and set in what is essentially a wind tunnel, had toppled in the storm, a sad but natural end. He dispatched a trail ranger to assess the damage.

It was when the ranger reported back that everything changed. The tree had not been brought down by natural forces. The cut was too clean. The trunk had been daubed with white paint. An incision known as a wedge cut had been made, designed to guide the tree’s fall. The ranger was unequivocal. “He said it was gone,” Mr. Gates remembered. “Someone had spoiled it.”