A tangled grove of rare, gnarled trees is hidden in an unlikely place on the sand banks of Formby.
Some 650 endangered black popular trees, making up 10% of the UK's whole population, are located to the south of Victoria Road car park - miles from their natural habitats along riverbanks in the Midlands and Southern England. Named for their distinctive ebony-coloured bark, the black poplar is one of the rarest trees in Britain, and provides a vital food source for the bright red larvae of the endangered goat moth.
Formby Civic Society member Dr Phil Smith, who carried out a survey of the poplars, said: "We looked at this history of these trees and were able to establish they were all more or less 120 years old. They were planted by the former estate - the Formby Point was once divided between two large manorial estates and they started planting pine trees in the 1880s, and had great problems getting them established because of the sandy dunes. They used the poplars as a sort of nurse crop around the plantations to protect them from the blowing sand."
