🦋RESTORE launches the Pertwood Plain Project on Global Rewilding Day:
A 3000-acre new grazing plain for southern England’s beleaguered wildlife.🦋
RESTORE is delighted to launch our major flagship project for 2024: the restoration of 3000 acres of Wiltshire farmland to a replete grassland ecosystem.
Salisbury Plain was once the Serengeti of the British Isles. The fossil record hints at a rich, crab-apple and hawthorn-studded grassland, rich in herbivores. In early Holocene times, wild horses, cattle, elk and red deer would all have concentrated here in numbers; something the density of their bones, hunted by our ancestors, attests to. In the recent past, the plain was still more extensive than today: a quiet haunt of inflatable bustards, bubbling black grouse, beetle-skewering shrikes and, until their removal by collectors, swallowtail butterflies.
Since this time, much has been lost. And most of this landscape, outwith the confines of the MoD’s land, has vanished into a sea of monocultural cereals; many of which are becoming increasingly hard to maintain, let alone profit from, in a rapidly changing climate. Now, it’s time for a more exciting future. And in the Pertwood Plain Project, we have an opportunity to restore what has been lost.
Working as managers of Lower Pertwood Organic Farm in Wiltshire, RESTORE plans to transform this landscape to a grazing plain; removing harmful and intensive chemicals from the land; restoring complex species-rich downland, and replacing a failing cycle of input-heavy arable with a grazing operation that puts nature first.
Step one will be restoring soil richness: removing excess nutrients and beginning to rebuild the amazing trophic web provided by calcareous grassland. Once, large blue butterfly caterpillars would have been whisked below ground by zealous hordes of ants; it is to this rich jungle we hope to return. Step two will be reinstating structural complexity - the complex array of grassland and shrubland types waiting to express themselves. Step three will be to reinstate naturalistic grazing: the use of the land to which nature, and farming, ultimately responds best here. Many species will recolonise naturally over time: some, however will not. And so, we will come to Step Four: the reintroduction of lost species, especially invertebrates, that once haunted this Serengeti - and deserve to once again.
It is rare in Britain to have an opportunity for undiluted nature, where the moral imperative of giving nature a home is recognised front and centre.
It is a privilege to begin work creating a new grazing plain for the 21st century, and we look forwards to working with many partners, from The Wildlife Trusts to Butterfly Conservation and others, to bring this vision to reality over the coming years.
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