Tax-break trees: how woodland became a store of wealth for the rich

Stobo Hope in the Scottish Borders has been cleared, ploughed and sown with rows of saplings by a ‘forestry carbon sequestration fund’. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

On the English-Scottish border a small species of butterfly, the northern brown argus, has fended off one of the biggest investors in the UK.

Todrig, with its heath moorlands and hundreds of species of flora and fauna, represents an investment that could save Britain’s wealthiest families millions of pounds in inheritance tax.