Nature's recovery

We don’t just manage nature reserves, we look for opportunities to make them bigger, better and more connected. Sometimes this means buying former agricultural land or even conifer plantations and transforming them so wildlife can return and flourish.

Walk through Robert’s Field nature reserve on a spring morning and you will be surrounded by cowslips. It’s hard to believe that the meadows of this nature reserve were once a dark conifer plantation where little else could survive.

The battle to save Robert’s Field had been lost in the 1960s when it was planted with conifers. But the Trust knew it had potential and thirty years later bought the land.  

Wild wet fenland once covered vast swathes of south Lincolnshire. Most of it was drained centuries ago.

The evocative call of cranes were long gone. As were with the booms of bitterns and drumming of snipe. The natural sounds of the landscape had been silenced. The few nature reserves that survived were small and isolated until the Trust bought an arable farm and renamed it Willow Tree Fen.

Although it remained a farmed landscape with cattle grazing replacing the wheat and beans, water was allowed to return, and with it came the wildlife.