Groups working to promote Perthshire as "Big Tree Country" are celebrating a half-million pound cash boost from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Perthshire's ‘Big Tree Country Heritage & Access Project' has been awarded £526,500, which will be used on projects to protect and promote many of the
county's rich heritage of remarkable trees and woodlands. The total investment in the project will be £1.65 million over the next three years.

The partnership project, which is being led by the Perth & Kinross Countryside Trust, will tell the story of Perthshire's tree and woodland heritage through a network of 20 woodland heritage locations. Areas to benefit from the funding will be:

• Paths will be upgraded to provide 'Access for All' routes.
• Well-developed interpretation will detail the connection between sites through history,
  people, heritage trees, species and associated events.
• A strategic plan for tree management and conservation will be implemented to ensure the longevity of the most historic trees and to provide sensitive access to them.
• There will also be a programme of propagation of some species to provide
  genetically related replacements.

Perthshire is one of the most-wooded parts of Scotland, and is known as "the cradle of British forestry" because it was there that the first serious efforts were made to reforest Scotland after centuries of forest loss. Its unusually rich heritage of trees and woods includes 22 of Scotland's 100 Heritage Trees of Scotland celebrated in a book of that name published in 2003. They include the Birnam Oak, thought to be the last remnant of the Birnam Wood immortalised in Shakespeare's Macbeth, Niel Gow's Oak, under which the famous Scots fiddler composed many of his tunes, and the Fortingall Yew, the oldest living thing in Europe. Many of its woods and forests are important as visitor attractions and as recreational assets to local communities, such as Queen Elizabeth Forest Park, Drummond Hill at
Kenmore, and Kinnoull Hill Woodland Park at Perth.

For more information:

• Perthshire Big Tree Country
• Treefest Scotland
• Heritage Lottery Funding