Rosa Lister
speaker
157 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 19 Jul
Rosa Lister’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Carruthers and Graham were sentenced in July.
Before the sentencing, a junior council presented a victim impact statement.
This consisted of emails and messages from members of the public, read in a loud, slow, tragic voice.
She tried her best.
They said things like, I've never felt this way about any other tree, and this feels like losing a close family member, and RIP beautiful tree, I wish I'd got to meet you.
Carruthers and Graham were each given four years and three months in prison.
The sentence seemed weirdly over the top.
When people cut down a tree in England, what usually happens is nothing.
That or a fine.
The sentence, Judge Lambert said, was based on a consideration of the social impact of the offence.
People had loved the tree, she said, and Carruthers and Graham had destroyed it in an act of vandalism that was somehow both mindless and premeditated.
According to a tree lawyer I talked to, it was the first time anyone in the United Kingdom had gone to prison for cutting down a single tree.
I only got to see the stump.
I visited in late spring.
It was very sunny.
The remnants of the Sycamore come into view as you get to the top of a slithery flight of stairs set into the bank.
Then you look down at the stump, which is in precisely the spot where it would have been good to come across a tree, a nice tall one with spreading branches, pretty old, standing totally alone in the landscape, looking like the idea of shelter.
Before this, I hadn't grasped why the locals had gotten so worked up over a single tree, let alone the rest of the country.
Up close, though, their reactions made more sense.
The tree had been special.
Showing 121–140 of 157 · page 7 of 8
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