March of the wild
AN ‘ambitious’ Nature-recovery project spanning the English and Welsh border has been announced by The Wildlife Trusts. The project, titled Wilder Marches, aims to restore, recover and create habitats across the Marches region, according to the charity. Wilder Marches will involve four counties (Shropshire, Herefordshire, Montgomeryshire and Radnorshire) and three river catchments in an attempt to help rare species, such as curlew, pine marten and freshwater pearl mussel, recover through ‘regenerative farming and emerging green-finance opportunities’.
The project intends to restore and create lost habitats, including peatlands and grasslands
The Marches is an almost 250,000-acre natural and cultural landscape straddling the border of England and Wales and encompassing the headwaters of the River Lugg, River Teme and River Clun. Although it contains areas of heathland and peatland, flower-rich meadows, wood pasture and ‘ffridd’ (a special upland habitat of scrub and grassland), The Wildlife Trusts says: ‘The Marches also have areas of intensive farming, as well as extensive forestry plantations where Nature is struggling to thrive.’
The Wilder Marches project intends to use the reform of farming subsidies to work with landowners and communities to ‘develop new business models that will help sustain farm incomes [as well as] allowing Nature to be restored across the farmed landscape’. Together with protecting rare species, the project also intends to ‘restore and create lost habitats, including peatlands, native woodlands and grasslands’, and ‘re-establish natural processes across river channels, floodplains and wetlands to help reduce the
