The sun was shining, people were gingerly paddling in the sea and dogs were being walked up and down the coast – a typical day on the beautiful Dorset coast. But the beachgoers probably didn’t know that just a few minutes inland, history was being made.
On Wednesday, at the National Trust’s Purbeck Heath nature reserve, four beavers were released from crates and crawled into Little Sea, a 33-hectare lake. They are the first beavers to be legally released in England, after 400 years of absence and a fight to return them to the landscape.
