Community rewilding charity · Harth Valley
We buy back tired ground, block old drains and plant from local seed, then let the valley do the slow work. Eighty-six hectares so far. Room for plenty more.
Purpose Why we exist
Fieldwork started in 2017 when eleven neighbours pooled savings to lease a waterlogged field nobody wanted. That field is now Bracken Mere, and the reed warblers came back to it in the fourth spring.
We still work the same way: buy or lease marginal land, undo the drainage and mowing that kept it bare, plant only what grew here before, and count what returns. Every site is open to walk, every survey is published.
How a site recoversSites Places in recovery
Each site has its own survey sheet, its own volunteers and its own pace. Together they make a corridor that otters, barn owls and dragonflies can travel.
A North reach · since 2021
Forty-one drainage grips blocked by hand, six scrapes dug, and the water table back up by thirty centimetres. Reed warblers, snipe and a pair of little grebes nested this year.
C South ridge · since 2023
A former silage field sown with yellow rattle to weaken the rye grass. Two summers on: 38 flowering species and the valley’s first small heath butterflies in a decade.
B Valley floor · since 2019
3,600 alder, oak, hazel and bird cherry grown from seed collected within five miles. We stopped using plastic tree guards in 2022; deer fencing is wooden and comes down in 2030.
Survey 2025 field report
Every figure comes from our spring and autumn surveys, run by volunteers and checked by the county records centre.
Up from 11 hectares in 2017.
91% survival after three winters.
Including 9 on the county red list.
From 312 people aged 7 to 84.
Next report · February 2027Read the survey notes
Method How a site recovers
Before a spade goes in, we spend a full year recording what is already there: soil cores, water levels, breeding birds, the plants in every hedge. Neighbours tell us what the field used to be.
Usually that means blocking drains, ending fertiliser or changing when we mow. One change at a time, so we can tell what worked. Seed and saplings come only from the valley.
Same transects, same dates, every season. Grazing ponies from Harth Farm do the mowing. We intervene less each year, and publish every survey sheet in full.
Mature sites pass to a local land trust with a covenant that keeps them wild for 125 years. The money we free up goes to the next tired field.
Journal Field notes
In June we left a three-metre strip standing along the east fence. By September it held seed heads from eleven native species.
On our first morning count, fourteen goldfinches fed in the strip over twenty minutes, alongside two linnets we had not recorded on site before. Next year we will leave two strips and move them, so every part of the meadow gets a winter off.
We cleared two collapsed culverts by hand to keep the stream bed undisturbed. Within the hour, water was moving through the northern pool again for the first time since spring.
Hollow stems, where solitary bees overwinter. A log pile in shade. One patch of long grass. Leaf litter under the hedge. Seed heads on teasel and knapweed. Your garden is a stepping stone between our sites.
“My grandad cut peat on that mere. Last month I heard snipe drumming over it with my own daughter.”
Giving Give to the valley
Gifts stay in the Harth Valley and are spent on seed, saplings, tools and surveys. We are independently audited each year; the 2025 accounts are on request.
89p of every pound goes straight to work on the ground.
Visits Come out with us
24 Oct
Sat 9:30–12:30 · Willowbank Wood, Harth Lane gate
07 Nov
Sat 10:00–13:00 · Bracken Mere, north car park
21 Nov
Sat 13:00–15:30 · Seedhouse Yard barn
No experience needed. Under-16s welcome with an adult. Gloves and tools provided.