I mentioned in February that our Community Interest Company Buy Land Plant Trees had acquired another piece of land, with the combined help of a generous donor, yourselves our customers, and team Chimney Sheep. I put on social media that we'd acquired a mountain, and a few disparagingly commented that it was merely a hill.

Anyway, it's a “fell” in Cumbria, which can be a mountain or a hill. It's 155 acres of steepness, a big mound of a lump of land that can be seen from miles away.

Since we acquired it we have done….nothing! Well, we have had a lot of meetings and discussions and negotiated over design plans. We knew when we bought it that it comprised around 80% sub-optimal heathland. It was severely over-grazed. We always have sites checked over by an ecologist before doing anything, to make sure we keep the “good” bits and don’t plant trees in the wrong place or anything. We had it surveyed by Wild Lakeland - a highly qualified and well-respected ecologist came up with a brilliant plan that involved a mosaic of sessile oak woodland, scrub, upland woody heath and a big patch where we just leave the heathland to do its thing and recover the bilberry, heather, crowberry, cowberry, cranberry, mosses and other species that are there in tiny numbers and just need the opportunity to come back.

You need permission to plant trees, even just a small number. Also we need to apply for grants because putting up fences, restoring trees & scrub and repairing drainage cuts is an expensive business, and all our money was spent on acquiring the land. So there’s more process to go through when grant-funding these projects.

We sent the ecology report and recommendations to the Forestry Commission who sort the permissions out and they said as it was classed as dry heathland, although there wasn’t much of that left after all the grazing, they would not permit tree planting on most of it. There are older maps that show parts of it as being woodland before it went to heathland, but these were disregarded. We mentioned that they had given us permission to plant clusters of trees in habitat mosaics in dry heathland at Low Fell, in fact they had paid us to do it there, but they disregarded that.

There’s a bit of an irony in that we have a Forestry Commission Sitka spruce plantation on 2 sides of the site, but seemingly, one side of the fence can be forest and the other side is heathland.

We sent the planting proposal to Natural England whose approval is also required, and they said that there was a risk that it might all go to woodland and that was just as bad as being over-grazed.

We spoke to a lot of people who know a lot more about ecology and upland heathland restoration than we do. They all said the authorities need a kick up the bum, and that what we were proposing was an exciting project that would be very beneficial to biodiversity.

We spoke to the history people at the Lake District National Park because there are mine spoils there; it was intensively mined up to 100 years ago. They loved our cluster planting method and said that it would work well around the spoil heaps and actually help to preserve the mining archaeology.

We spoke to the Woodland Trust who were enthusiastic about encouraging scrub creation at Murton Fell.

We went back to Natural England and the Forestry Commission, and asked if they might reconsider their original responses. 7 of us had a meeting at Murton Fell in horizonal hail, not the best of conditions for looking at maps and species lists and whatnot. Hail is really noisy against your hood and you really have to shout to have a conversation. They understood what we wanted to do and were equally frustrated that they have to maintain a system that looks at habitat types in silos: woodland / scrub / heathland / blanket bog / acid grassland….these are all separated out into distinct sections that are treated differently. It’s a bonkers system. Most of the money ultimately comes from Defra but different agencies deliver grants for different types of terrain. I don’t like to think about how much money allocated to nature recovery is hoovered up in duplicated staff roles.

Anyhow, I think that the outcome of the meeting was that Natural England are happy with our proposals and confident that we are not going to wreck lovely heathland with nasty trees, the Forestry Commission can fund a decent chunk of woodland creation, and if we call the other bit scrub then we don’t need to get an environmental impact assessment done on it. Vouloir, c’est pouvoir. The applications are going in. We just have to hope they are processed in time for us to start planting this season.