Green Match Fund success for Schiehallion project

Trust celebrates raising £20,000 to support native woodland recovery on East Schiehallion, through this year's The Big Give Green Match Fund.

Thanks to the generosity of John Muir Trust Members and supporters, we have raised an incredible £20,000 through the Big Give’s Green Match Fund to support our Mountain Woodland Regeneration Project on the slopes of East Schiehallion.

Every donation was doubled through match funding, helping us reach our target and kickstart this important work.

About the project

We are working to bring back native mountain woodland – one of Scotland’s rarest and most ecologically valuable habitats. Once widespread across the uplands, these woodlands have been reduced to scattered remnants, largely due to centuries of deforestation, poor grazing management, and a lack of natural regeneration.

Crucially, Scotland has lost much of its native woodland cover, with less than 4% of land now supporting these irreplaceable habitats. Mountain woodland is particularly scarce, with recovery made harder still by high numbers of grazing animals.

Why is native mountain woodland important?

Mountain (or montane) woodland is a habitat consisting of short, hardy trees that should grow from around 600m above sea-level to the UK's highest summits.

It supports an exceptional variety of life, including specialist upland birds, lichens, bryophytes, fungi, and invertebrates that rely on the structural diversity and continuity of native tree cover. It also provides vital ecosystem services such as storing carbon, stabilising soils, regulating water and helping to reduce flooding.

Importantly, upland and montane woods act as ecological corridors, giving species room to move and adapt in the face of climate change. They’re part of our natural heritage too, with tree species like downy birch, rowan, Scots pine, hazel, willow, and sessile oak all well-adapted to the Scottish Highlands.

Protecting a habitat under pressure

At East Schiehallion, red deer and encroaching sheep are grazing down young tree seedlings before they can be established. This intense browsing pressure is a direct consequence of historical land use patterns and outdated deer management policy, which does not currently require landowners to maintain deer populations at ecologically sustainable levels.

There’s already positive action in the area. Neighbouring landowners, such as the Highland Perthshire Communities Land Trust at Dùn Coillich, have introduced deer management strategies – including extensive fencing – to support woodland recovery. But despite these collaborative efforts, the cumulative grazing pressure remains high, hindering natural regeneration.

Ideally, we would manage herbivore numbers through coordinated, landscape-scale population control – reducing the need for hard infrastructure. However, in the absence of robust national policy and legislation, strategic fencing remains the most effective and immediate tool available to protect new woodland and allow nature to recover. Without it, natural regeneration simply cannot occur at scale.

A great start

The £20,000 raised will allow us to extend and upgrade up to 12km of fencing, helping protect more than 300 hectares of upland habitat. This fencing will be designed to work with the natural terrain – avoiding the creation of hard boundaries or full exclosures – and will support a mix of open hillside and native woodland, encouraging a patchwork of habitats to develop over time.

Liv Adams, the Trust’s Major Donor Fundraiser, said: "We’re delighted to have raised these funds to support native woodland regeneration at East Schiehallion. This work represents everything the John Muir Trust stands for – restoring ecologically rich habitats, supporting biodiversity, and protecting our wild places for future generations.

"We’re especially grateful to the Big Give for providing the Green Match Fund platform – without its match funding, we simply wouldn’t have been able to raise such a significant sum in such a short time.

Future plans

The regeneration of mountain woodland doesn’t happen overnight. On an ecological timescale, the development of healthy, diverse woodland communities can take decades. But the benefits will last for centuries—providing habitat for species like black grouse, ring ouzel, and mountain hare, locking away carbon in both trees and soils, and buffering the landscape from the impacts of extreme weather, erosion, and biodiversity loss.

Liv says that this £20,000 marks the first step towards our much larger vision for the East Schiehallion estate: "We’ll be launching a wider public appeal this autumn and look forward to sharing more updates as the project develops.

"In the meantime, a heartfelt thank you to everyone who donated and helped us get started. Together, we’re proving what’s possible when nature is given the chance to recover."

• If you’d like to hear more about the project and explore ways to support the next phase, we’d love to hear from you – please get in touch with our income generation team.

Photography by East Schiehallion Mountain Woodland Project Manager Tom Corke.