Youth Leadership Group 3 day Site Visit August 2021: Day 3

On the final day of their visit our YLG spent the day reviewing what we’d learnt, discussing what we need to do next to get a better idea of what the current picture is – what species we have on the land, where we could do ongoing survey and monitoring, what other local environmental projects are doing.

We have already noticed some great changes since there have been less sheep grazing ….

Looking across the western pasture where the pesky sheep have been kept out there is definitely more plant life and lots more colour …..

We spend some time brainstorming a funding application that we could put in to help cover some of the costs of our initial survey work:

We all gained a huge amount of information and inspiration from our meetings with local farmers and experts on Days 1 & 2 and from this we have started to form our plans for the first stages of this project. First, with the support of an ecologist, we wiant to undertake some baseline surveys. This will help us determine our future more in-depth monitoring and survey work, for which we plan to use the same framework as other projects in our area, such as Wild Ingleborough. Whilst we are gathering this information we also plan to restore a traditional stone sheepfold, so that we can use this as a meeting and information point on the land. From the information that we got from Pete and Steve we can start to plan building on our existing scrub and wooded areas to see if we can enrich and enlarge these to create more diverse habitats.

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and the group did some really informative presentations based on the map they created over their 3 day visit ….