Dead wood - Woodland walks on National Trust land

We also walked down a white water stream called Watersmeet, to Lynmouth, and that was an excellent rocky river gorge with trees growing all the way down the sides, which sometimes are prone to landslides. The young ones walked down the river by jumping from rock to rock.

The National Trust cannot make up its mind what to do about dead trees. At Arlington Court they have made a bit of a fetish of keeping all the dead trees to rot on the ground. The idea is that they make a great habitat for insects. There is a fantastic amount of moss but I didn't see any insects.Is it too early in the year for insects? (Here in Surrey the ants are making their annual pilgrimages to my kitchen bin.) There is a terrible waste of perfectly good timber. Even lovely straight tree trunks lie around on top of the other dead tree trunks in a great mossy pile of jack straws. Maybe they need to think hard about the optimum amount of dead tree to keep. I think they are keeping an embarrassing amount.

At another NT property they were trying to sell some random bits of dead tree for people to carve. Also a few nicely sawn planks, but not in any bulk.