1980 acres of mixed riparian, arable and woodland was brought together through six landowners to create one of the first nature recovery projects underpinned by private finance, biodiversity net-gain, carbon credits and regenerative agriculture. The model is to provide consistent and stable returns to the landowners, whilst delivering remarkable biodiversity and abundance recovery in a matter of years.

Digg & Co. were commissioned from the outset to work with the landowners to masterplan the entire landscape. We used our ecology first design approach to analyse and understand the historic and current ecological drivers and we married these with both public and private data sets to ‘see’ the landscape in a natural state. Through geology, soils, hydrology, drone imagery, satellites, hard won historic personal farming knowledge and many days of walking the landscape the design evolved. A mixture of historic heath, dynamic edge habitats such as birch thickets and scrub, species rich grasslands of varying soil preference, wetlands, new river channels and floodplain meadow mosaics. All these slowly came to light from reading the land as if natural.