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Tarmac will be supporting the planting of another 1800 trees in the Yorkshire Dales this year thanks to their ‘People and the Planet’ initiative.
It is the second year of a ten-year partnership with Clapham-based Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust, which will also see the education and development of 2500 people and the completion of a staggering 7700 hours of volunteering.
The initiative has already seen a small group of volunteers remove hundreds of redundant tree tubes from Bargh Wood near Stainforth last year and that work continued in Grassington recently.
Employees from Tarmac undertook general site maintenance at Pasture Wood in the village.
Project is part of national plan to help the endangered species prosper after numbers plunge by half
Dormice have become extinct in 17 English counties in the past 100 years. Photograph: imageBROKER/Alamy
Dormice have become extinct in 17 English counties in the past 100 years. Photograph: imageBROKER/Alamy
Sun 18 Apr 2021 02.30 EDT
For the first time in 100 years, dormice have the freedom to roam among the rolling hills of the Yorkshire Dales, thanks to a project to restore their delicate natural habitat.
Landowners and farmers in Wensleydale have grown a six-mile continuous stretch of woodland and hedgerows to provide a highway to join up two fledgeling populations of the charming native mammals.
LAND managers have spent the past three years planting, or bringing into ‘appropriate management’, hedgerows and woodlands either side of Freeholders’ Wood at Aysgarth Falls, where dormice were reintroduced in 2008. Farmers have even planted brambles – a plant they might usually regard as a thorny nuisance – in order to provide the mammals with late season fruit. Although now formally completed, the impact of the three-year ‘Wensleydale Dormouse Project’ will be monitored. Simple tubes, containing inked pads, have been hung in hedges to track how far the dormice spread out from their Aysgarth stronghold. “Local people have really taken to hazel dormice,” said project officer Phill Hibbs. “School children at Bainbridge studied them during lockdown, so they’ll know that the dormice are about to wake up from their winter torpor, while local landowners – particularly Stuart Raw at Hollins Farm and Tom Orde-Powlett of the Bolton Estate – have enthusias
Hazel dormouse in hand. Picture: Clare Pengelly WOODS and hedgerows across a 9.5 kilometre stretch of mid-Wensleydale have been connected to create an ideal home for the endangered Hazel Dormouse. Land managers have spent the past three years planting, or bringing into ‘appropriate management’, hedgerows and woodlands either side of Freeholders’ Wood at Aysgarth Falls, where dormice were reintroduced in 2008. Farmers have even planted brambles – plants they might usually regard as a thorny nuisance – in order to provide the mammals with late season fruit. Although now formally completed, the impact of the three-year ‘Wensleydale Dormouse Project’ will be monitored. Simple tubes, containing inked pads, have been hung in hedges to track how far the dormice spread out from their Aysgarth stronghold.
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