We started our tour in the wildlife meadow.  This area is not grazed during Spring and Summer during the wildflower growing period. There has never been any herbicide or fertiliser on the land, and I was able to see an amazing array of flowers, from meadow vetchling, tufted vetch and birds foot trefoil (one of my favourites!) to yarrow and sneezewort. At the end of August/September, it is cut for hay and then grazed to keep the grass short, allowing lots of light to germinate new wildflower seedlings.   In order to keep down the rye grass, your Wildlife Trust’s wonderful volunteers have sown 14kg of yellow rattle seed.  That equates to around 4.2 million individual yellow rattle seeds!  On top of that 7000 (yes – seven thousand…) wildflower plug plants (betony, devil’s bit scabious, autumn hawksbit to name but three) had been grown by our friends at Cheshire Wildlife Trust and planted by the amazing volunteers.  Wow!! Big shout out for all your hard work!  On a typical summer’s day, there could be 58 million flowers in these meadows. What a result!

We then carried on with our walk past some beautiful hedging in the Lancashire and Westmoreland style. This involves a double row of trees with an open channel between.  The top weaves together creating all sorts of wonderful nesting spaces.  Another shout out here to volunteers Ann Shaw and Francis Williams who are top hedge layers and have been passing on their skills to other volunteers, creating a bigger cohort with hedgelaying skills.  Ann and Francis take their time, to train others, but Cutacre also had a visit from four-times national hedge laying champion Peter Gibson.  Last winter, he laid 550 metres of hedging, averaging 80 metres a day! What an amazing skill to have and thank you to them from the wildlife their hedges support day in day out.

The hedges are not allowed to get too big, so as to encourage the grey partridge, currently red listed.  They have been seen in the area (including a nest with 8 chicks) and friends from Salford University have recorded their calls.  Lots of invertebrates in the meadows and low hedges add up to perfect partridge territory.

Next stop was to say hello to the conservation grazing herd. Eight English Longhorn cattle were sitting happily, although one had lost its no fence collar.  Stephen showed me the app on his phone which allows him to know where they are at any time. They are a hardy breed and stay out all year, provided the ground is not too wet.  They graze in patches and you can read more about their successes with this scheme here.

We then moved on to talk about the ponds. Bomb craters have created some ponds.  Other ponds have been created from the old bell pits, where a hole was dug in the ground, the coal extracted and the resulting depression fills up with water – hey presto- new pond! Stephen also showed me one of the “ghost” ponds that he hopes to restore this year. These are ponds which appear on old map, but are now more marshy areas.  The pond restoration projects so far are already a ‘great’ success with Great Crested Newts moving in. 

Finally, Stephen took me over to see another area of the site – a small patch of heathland, covered in heather.  I really couldn’t understand why there was a patch of heathland, surrounded by rough pasture and meadow.  The answer lies in history.  This was an old spoil heap and so is very acidic, mimicking the soil conditions of acid heath. 

Our tour time had flown by. I had heard tales of Dyers Greenweed flowering here for the first time in Greater Manchester since the 1970s. I had seen meadow brown, gatekeeper and skipper butterflies and renewed my love of wildflowers. It is clear that the work done by your Wildlife Trust at this site has meant key species have returned but there is more that can be done to drive nature’s recovery here so the site has become the trust’s first Habitat Bank (https://www.lancswt.org.uk/habitat-bank-cutacre)  to turbo charge further restoration.