Blean Wood
Blean restoration: every £1 donated by you matched by £20 in other funding. Kent Wildlife Trust is asking for your help in bringing about the landscape scale restoration of the vast, beautiful and internationally important Blean Woods.
Due to funding commitments we have secured from other supporters including the Heritage Lottery Fund, Tubney and Peter De Haan Charitable Trusts, every £1 given to this once in a generation project, will release a further £20 in funding.
Through the exemplary generosity of the members and supporters of Kent Wildlife Trust, we now protect or own outright over 2,600 acres of Blean Woods - a substantial part of one of the largest ancient woodlands in the country.
Steeped in history and legend, the Blean contains remnants of the original wild wood that once covered much of the country. However, a great deal more of the woodland has been damaged for native plants and animals by the successive introduction of commercial and other introduce species.
Your donation, massively enhanced by the matched funding we have been promised, will help us to recreate the style of habitat once found in the original wild wood - an environment teeming with all the richness, delicacy and splendour of native British wildlife.
The work to achieve this - and the costs involved are formidable. A four-year programme of works involving everyone from experts at Kent Wildlife Trust (staff and volunteers), to specialist contractors, to local communities, will be involved. Introduced species such as rhododendron and conifers will need to removed. Rotational coppicing will be resumed together with a conservation grazing regime using the Trust’s specialist livestock including Konik ponies and Highland cattle. Specialist works to encourage species such as dormice, bats and nightingales will be undertaken.
The biodiversity gains likely to be achieved by this restoration are truly tremendous. You will be helping to bring about conditions where rare species already present can flourish and colonise new areas of the Blean - including nightjar, heath fritillary and white admiral butterflies, yellow archangel and wood anemone wildflowers and there’s much more. Restoration has every chance of encouraging the return of endangered species such as woodlark, buzzards, purple emperor and small pearl-bordered fritillary butterflies.
Your donation, enhanced by £20 for every £1 you give, will help to bring about wildlife habitat restoration, on a massive scale, in one of the largest and most important ancient woodlands in the country.
- £10 could pay for two metres of stock fencing to enable conservation grazing to restore wooded heath
- £25 could pay for hand tools, such as bow saws and loppers, to help with woodland management
- £50 could pay for a butterfly or dragonfly monitoring survey
- £250 could pay for one conservation task to coppice ancient woodland to encourage woodland flowers
- £1,000 could pay for a forest harvester machine to clear conifers for three days to encourage native trees and shrubs
