‘A 100-year vision’: Skiddaw’s barren peak to spring to life in ambitious rewilding

Skiddaw has long stood proud in the northern Lake District, a distinctive, treeless peak that is England’s sixth highest mountain. But now the fell’s barren heights will spring back to life after its purchase for rewilding by Cumbria Wildlife Trust .

More than 1,200 hectares of Skiddaw Forest, once a royal hunting ground, will become England’s highest nature reserve and the UK’s biggest project to restore Atlantic rainforest, after the site came up for sale for £6.25m.

“We can’t believe it, to be honest,” said Stephen Trotter, the chief executive of Cumbria Wildlife Trust. “It’s not every day you get the chance to buy a mountain – in fact, you never get the chance, especially in the Lake District. It’s really exciting to have the opportunity to put some nature back into this landscape.”

Wildlife poised to return to Skiddaw includes hen harriers, black grouse – which vanished from these fells relatively recently – water voles, aspen and rare upland bumblebees.

The mountain has heather sides that bloom prettily in high summer but its grassland is bleak and fairly uniform. The trust wants to revive a mosaic of habitats after decades of suppression by intensive sheep grazing. As well as temperate rainforest, there will be blanket bog, heathland, flower-rich acid grassland and montane scrub.

Montane scrub refers to extremely low-lying trees and shrubs that survive at high altitude and provide food and a biodiverse sanctuary for rare and declining birds such as black grouse. “It doesn’t exist anywhere in the Lakes yet but it should,” Trotter said.

Cumbria Wildlife Trust was outbid during the sale of Skiddaw a while ago, but when the mountain returned to the market the charity was able to snap it up this time, thanks to £5m from a £38m Aviva fund for the restoration of temperate rainforest across western Britain.

Now the trust must raise the final £1.25m from donations towards the purchase, which has been enabled by philanthropic loans.

The trust will plant 300,000 native trees over 250 hectares of Skiddaw, all of which will be sourced from seed harvested from local trees growing at altitude to boost the saplings’ chances of survival. Local volunteers will help collect seed, raise trees in local nurseries and plant them out.

But the conservationists are keen to stress that Skiddaw will not be cloaked in dense forest. Trees will not grow on the summit or the most wind-scoured slopes.

One-third of the site is peatland, which will not be planted with trees. Instead, this blanket bog will be rewetted by blocking drains and holding back water, so the peat remains saturated and continues to form, rather than drying up, shrinking and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Gemma Jennings, Cumbria’s peatland team manager, said: “It’s storing a large amount of carbon by preserving it. Repairing those exposed areas which would release carbon is really, really important.”

Restored peat bogs will store water on the uplands, and alleviate droughts and floods, potentially benefiting flood-struck communities downstream. Restored wetlands also filter water, purifying it for human consumption.

Jennings said: “It’s amazing that doing something as simple as blocking up some ditches and holding back some water can have lots of benefits.”

Previous wilding schemes in the Lake District have faced criticism from some who say they are turfing sheep off the land and putting traditional farmers out of business.

But rewilding Skiddaw may prove less controversial because there have not been sheep there for a decade. The previous landowner was paid by the government not to graze sheep on Skiddaw to allow some recovery of biodiversity after the mountain – a site of special scientific interest – was judged to be in an “unfavourable” condition in the 1980s and 90s.

Trotter said: “We want to work with farmers and commoners, respecting the different perspectives and coming up with solutions that work for the environment, conservation and farmers. We need to work together. It’s not one or the other – farming or restoration. We’ve got to have both.”

According to Trotter, the trust has not had a negative reaction so far. “There are inevitably concerns. We want to make sure this is not only about trees but trees and farming going together. We’re not planning to get rid of grazing livestock – we plan to reintroduce them.”

But the trust admits it could be years before trees are well-established enough for livestock to be reintroduced, with cattle increasingly favoured over sheep for upland grazing that is more beneficial to wild plants.

Will there still be a role for sheep on Skiddaw? “Let’s see,” Trotter said. “A wild landscape up here needs wild herbivores if we’re going to draw back from direct human intervention in time. It is a 100-year vision. We’re not trying to do everything at once.”

The mountaineer Chris Bonington welcomed the purchase. He said: “As a lover of the Lake District fells, and a keen advocate for the environment and biodiversity, I can’t think of a better organisation to manage Skiddaw Forest than Cumbria Wildlife Trust. Their tireless work has really helped to put wildlife into the consciousness of the public and put nature back on to the map.”