A great-grandmother who travelled more than 200 miles to see the Sycamore Gap vandals sentenced has said justice was not done.

Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers are being sentenced at Newcastle Crown Court for chopping down the Sycamore Gap tree - an act of vandalism that caused outrage worldwide

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”.

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.