All fall down.....

Trees are living things and will eventually grow old and die. For the wood as a whole to persevere, young trees must be coming up to replace the older ones. Here in Glen Tilt, many centuries of overgrazing has prevented the establishment of younger trees, the existing trees die off and are not replaced, and the woodland cover gradually disappears. You can see two dead birch trees here, the one in the foreground having broken off more recently, the one further up has been dead many years. The lower part of Glen Tilt has a good woodland cover of native trees, but on the more outlying slopes, this sort of contraction of the woodland area is still occurring.