Spuckles Wood
£110,000 needed to restore and extend vital new land under the Trust’s management - ancient woodland and chalk grassland in the mid-Kent Downs.
Spuckles and Kennelling Wood Nature Reserves, near Stalisfield, consists of 54 acres of precious ancient woodland and is at the centre of Kent Wildlife Trust’s “Wilderness Down” – a living landscape project to bring more land into conservation management.
These woods, a fragile and irreplaceable biodiversity resource, support a mixture of species from mighty oaks and majestic beech to violets, carpets of bluebells and the exquisite greater butterfly orchid. We now have a unique opportunity to restore an area of land adjacent to Spuckles
Wood back to chalk grassland. This restored habitat combination could potentially see the return of key species including red kite and marbled white butterfly.
Your generosity is critical in bringing about the restoration of new wildlife habitat that will be protected by the Trust, safe from development, forever.
Your donation can help us to:
- Undertake rotational coppicing, letting light back into the woodland and encouraging the growth of delicate flowers including bluebell and lady orchid, a species restricted to Kent.
- Restore the agriculturally damaged 15 acre grassland extension to Wilderness Down.
- Install fencing and a water supply, allowing a programme of intensive grazing to begin.
- Use different species of our hardy grazing stock, including feral goats, Wiltshire horn sheep and Exmoor ponies, over an extended period, to subject the damaged area to different grazing pressures (to encourage maximum biodiversity gains).
- Suppress nutrient levels on the grassland to allow the return of species such as cowslip and hairy violet.
By supporting this project, you will be helping the wildlife of Kent in three very important ways. Firstly, by supporting the management of fragile and increasingly scarce, ancient woodland (at least 400 years old).
Secondly, by helping to restore new land for wildlife that has been lost to intensive agriculture for many years, 15 acres that will become a new oasis for wildlife for future generations to enjoy. More wild flowers; more rare birds and insects; more of the Garden of England protected by Kent Wildlife Trust – because of your generosity.
Thirdly, by helping us to achieve our vision for a living landscape – an extended ecological network that is helping to restore natural systems on a landscape scale.
Opportunities to achieve such an impact for Kent’s wildlife are an all too scarce occurrence. Please support this unmissable opportunity and help Kent Wildlife Trust rebuild a living landscape. Your support will give the Trust the power to save and restore a unique and important wildlife oasis in the heart of the mid-Kent Downs.
To donate to this ongoing project
- Call our credit card hotline in office hours (01622) 662012
- Send a cheque to: Donations, Kent Wildlife Trust, Tyland Barn, Sandling, Maidstone, Kent. ME14 3BD.
