Isn’t it strange that green is the colour we most associate with nature concern. What bright green invariably means in the fields of the northern uplands, such as the Yorkshire Dales, is a place where wildlife has been almost completely purged. The point about field colour is so dramatically made at the Broughton estate you’d think it had been contrived precisely to convey this message. Here, the rolling hills, just south of the national park, have been planted with 280,000 trees of 15 species across 192 hectares (474 acres). In 2023, a further 72 hectares of the same bright green hue are earmarked for conversion to wood pasture.
Currently, the planted areas are a forest of plastic tree-sleeves, but even in this raw state, the dominant impression is of the terrain’s underlying colour, which is a kind of matted grey-brown. Yet a tongue of the old livid-green sheepwalk intrudes into these rewilding sections and the difference couldn’t be sharper.
Monday was World Rewilding Day and the opportunities entailed in that entire land-management approach are in some ways captured in this colour contrast. The green fields are shorn, flowerless – devoid of any plant diversity, in fact – and thus depleted of invertebrates and lacking in birds or mammals.
On the brown side, the summer’s vegetation may now be matted and dead, but it’s still a complex matrix that harbours large vole populations that are food for newly arrived buzzards, kestrels and barn owls.
Broughton is only three years into the most transformative example of rewilding in England and already the impacts are astonishing. Both the abundance and diversity of wildlife increase constantly, yet it’s in the coming decades that it will truly express the fullest changes.
Another aspiration closely associated with the new approach is almost visible at Broughton – at least on a clear day, because then you can make out Ingleborough national nature reserve on the northern horizon. It too embarked on a similar rewilding journey that involves farmers, Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and Natural England across 2,500 hectares. Since connectivity is at the very heart of nature’s own workings, the real transformation will be when wildlife-rich habitats extend across the entire 20-mile divide.
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