Wild Ennerdale is a partnership between three main landowners: The Forestry Commission, National Trust and United Utilities. Wild Ennerdale is made up of the lake, farmland, woodland, forest, open fell and mountains with United Utilities ownership being a relatively small proportion (shown in orange on the map below), comprising the lake and a small amount of additional land.
The grazing land at Ennerdale was originally dominated by sheep, ‘Wild Ennerdale’ aspires to work towards more natural grazing systems (very extensive ranging) with only a handful of animals ranging over the vast area. 
Ennerdale is also a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and the River Ehen which flows out of the lake is a designated Special Area for Conservation (SAC) although the designations are primarily for freshwater pearl mussels and Atlantic salmon the lake also contains arctic charr as well as native brown trout amongst other more common fish.
The concept of ‘Wild Ennerdale’ essentially involves reducing the management input (particularly forestry) and allowing the valley to return to a “wilder” state. Wild Ennerdale has no set time frame or set objective the idea being to allow natural processes to shape the valley to a much greater extent than would normally be the case but it is also for the benefit of people. For United Utilities the main interest is water quality, building relationships with key stakeholders and piloting the approach to raw water quality risk management, arising from land that we do not own, where historically risks have been greater.
For United Utilities, it is great to see that the issue of water quality has become fully integrated into the implementation of Wild Ennerdale. There are several examples of land management practices (such as no muck spreading) that have been changed on non-owned land for the sole benefit of water quality.
There are clearly lessons and approaches that we will apply elsewhere as we seek to improve our management of risks to water quality arising from non-owned catchment land as part the Drinking Water Safety Plan approach.
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