Finally, I can tell you the news I’ve been bursting to tell you for a few months now….we’re buying another mountain! It’s called Murton Fell, known colloquially as Knock Murton. It’s a small mountain, 145 acres in total, with a summit 447 metres high. You can see the sea from the top; on a clear day you can see across to the Isle of Man. It’s near the western boundary of the Lake District National Park, and to the south and east, the fells unroll as far as the eye can see. It’s very near Ennerdale, otherwise known as Wild Ennerdale, where there are extensive rewilding projects going on.
It’s incredibly steep, which makes it difficult for managing livestock. Most of it is inaccessible by quad bike. The site comprises a lot of heather, acid grassland, gorse scrub, some bracken, and old iron mines. The area was intensively mined in years gone by, but the adits are mostly filled in now. The bat enthusiast in me would like to explore the mines for hibernating bats….apparently, there are very extensive tunnels, but they sound unsafe, so perhaps it would be more sensible to let technology do the work and rig up some bat detecting equipment to see what sort of bat traffic there is.
We were able to make the purchase thanks to the generosity of an individual donor, plus donations from Chimney Sheep. I also want to say thank you to everyone who bought the tree vouchers. These really do just go on trees. We find the money or raise grants for the boring stuff like fencing, legal fees, insurance, and of course, land acquisition. This winter just gone, we bought 6,000 trees to go up Low Fell. We’ve planted around 280,000 trees up there now, but we keep finding space for more. You can go and see them if you like.
As with Low Fell, Knock Murton is open access land so you can yomp around all over it, though once we get trees in it would be preferable to keep to the paths. And away from the mines.
There are a lot of hurdles yet before we can do any tree planting. There are strict permissions to be gained, and we need to make sure we retain any existing beneficial habitat.
As a lot of it is heather heathland, we want to keep the heather but introduce juniper, Scots pine, and some other montane species to accelerate natural succession to woody heathland. On the lower flanks, we’d like to reintroduce sessile oak woodland which is classic Western Oakwood, found throughout the Lake District. The site is flanked on two sides by Forestry Commission land which is predominantly Sitka spruce. Some Sitka spruce trees have regenerated on Knock Murton and although we love all kinds of trees, Sitka is non-native and has a tendency to dominate, so these will be removed and replaced with other trees more in keeping with the montane habitat.
This project will be phased over several years and we will have to be patient…the earliest we can hope to plant is next autumn but we will have a busy spring and summer plotting and scheming.
