The fall of the Sycamore Gap tree was more than a loss of natural beauty. It was, for many, a symbolic attack on permanence, on meaning, and on shared identity.

James Canton spent two years sitting beneath an 800-year-old oak tree near his home in Essex, watching acorns fatten and butterflies land on the massive knurled grey trunk. Sometimes he sat in the branches too.

The two men who mounted a “moronic mission” to cut down the much-loved Sycamore Gap tree have been jailed for a total of eight and a half years. Daniel Graham, 39, and accomplice Adam Carruthers, 32, chopped down the tree in what they claimed was an “act of drunken stupidity”.