In the past 12 months Sustainable Catchment Management Plans have made real progress. Many have been completed or are close to completion due to the hard work and commitment of the estate teams, RSPB, Natural England and tenant farmers.
One example is our woodland planting programme, now largely completed with the remaining work scheduled for the autumn planting season. One such project is taking place in Dunsop Valley; this massive project is being carried out in the Forest of Bowland under the auspices of SCaMP and the Forestry Commission’s own conifer to native woodland programme. Two of the largest plantings are at Whitendale Farm and Brennand Farm seeing the creation of broadleaved woodland on land previously grazed by sheep. The woodland schemes have been designed and planted to replicate upland oak woodlands, a habitat type recognised nationally and internationally as being of high biodiversity importance.
The majority of our farm infrastructure improvements have also been completed with the rest due to be completed within the next year. This will allow the necessary changes to stocking density and patterns to take place – this is paramount for habitat recovery.
The Bowland estate held its annual stakeholders’ meeting in March at Halsteads Farm. Our tenant farmer there, Stephen Wallbank, explained how he had worked with us to successfully implement the environmental work in SCaMP and the Higher Level Stewardship scheme. The Higher Level stewardship scheme is a point based scheme that gives farmers a number of options for managing their land in an environmentally sensitive way. New farm buildings have been put up to accommodate sheep taken off the fell during the winter months. This allows the condition of the site of special scientific interest (SSSI) to improve through the reduction of grazing pressure. Simultaneously, the increase in housed livestock means an increase in of farm yard manure, so it was essential to improve the midden to provide greater storage capacity of manure.
Last winter saw work undertaken to block up man made moorland drains (grips), with nearly 40km being blocked on one farm alone. Re-wetting the moors by blocking grips raises the water level in the surrounding peat. This in turn allows peat forming plants like Sphagnum mosses to flourish and should reduce the amount of suspended sediment and colour released from the re-wetted areas. The good news is that results from grip blocking work carried out in the Goyt earlier in the programme are showing that Sphagnum is starting to re-establish itself.
One of the key outputs of SCaMP 1 include over 96% of SSSI in Bowland and Southern in favourable or recovering condition – an achievement confirmed by Natural England locally.
We’ve also collected more than two million pieces of data since we started monitoring the progress of our work on SCaMP. Data being collated from our monitoring programme suggests positive impacts in water quality, hydrology and vegetation.