Director’s review of the year 2023

Director of the North Pennines National Landscape, Chris Woodley-Stewart, offers his traditional round-up of the year just gone – a momentous one for the designation.

29 December 2023

It’s been another busy year, which I started out leading the North Pennines AONB Partnership and ended leading the North Pennines National Landscape. What’s in a name?

National Landscapes are statutory designations (and legally still called Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty), with the same protection in law as National Parks, but, in legislation at least, a single purpose – the conservation and enhancement of natural beauty. They have different governance (we’re not legal entities, except the Conservation Boards for the Chilterns and Cotswolds), and crucially very different funding from Government.

Our twin priorities as a team here in the North Pennines continue to be nature recovery and engaging people with their nature and heritage. If you’re wondering ‘why not landscape?’, then I’d say that nothing we’ve ever done for nature recovery has ever damaged the quality and character of the landscape, and there’s a global nature crisis. In practice, these twin priorities mean work on habitats and species, climate change mitigation, improving access to the landscape, running many nature and heritage based events and activities, shaping and improving the offer for visitors, conserving and interpreting historic structures, working in our local schools and bringing children and young people out into nature.

In terms of nature recovery and climate change mitigation this year, we’ve continued to make huge progress on peatland restoration through our in-house team, and our collaboration with willing farmers and land managers, and our skilled contractors. We recently finished our EU LIFE Programme funded project, ‘Pennine PeatLIFE’, through which we brought an area of peatland the size of Darlington under restoration. We’ve now brought over 45,000 hectares of peatland under restoration, an area about four times the size of Newcastle. This is significant for habitat restoration, but it also reduces the impacts of flooding, reduces sediment load and watercolour in our rivers. For climate resilience, this is like taking around 8000 cars a year off our roads, or the equivalent to the emissions from a million UK homes. A focus on nature recovery this year also came through our Tees-Swale: Naturally Connected programme, funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, with meadow restoration, tree cover expansion, wader-scrape creation, and more, and through our Heart of the Pennines Forest programme, and others.

Through Tees Swale, the Fellfoot Forward Landscape Partnership Scheme (also funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund), and our work in support of the UNESCO Global Geopark designation, we’ve worked with thousands of people, especially children, to get them more involved with their nature and heritage. In the Fellfoot Forward scheme especially we’ve conserved and consolidated historic buildings and features, including completing work at Long Meg and Her Daughters to protect the monument from damage by visitors’ cars.

We’ve undertaken a lot of new access work, through creating our new network of ‘Trampers’ (off-road mobility scooters), work on the Pennine Way and other popular routes, developing new IT-based interpretation of nature and heritage, and hosting a great many public events. We also curated our seventh annual North Pennines Stargazing Festival, which once again provided many great fun events with partner organisations, supporting the local economy and bringing visitors to the area beyond the traditional season. Spanning last year and this, we worked with many different groups to understand the barriers some people feel with accessing places like ours, through our A Landscape for Everyone programme. I hear people say that there are no barriers to accessing the countryside; all I can say is that this isn’t everyone’s experience and if we want all of society to care for and protect nature, all our landscapes need to feel like places where everyone feels welcome.

We’re also now into our second decade of running Bowlees Visitor Centre, and we hosted a range of public events and activities there again, especially through our Wild Wednesdays and Discovery Clubs run through the Tees-Swale programme.

The Farming in Protected Landscapes programme, conceived as part of the Agricultural Transition Plan, has been a real success in delivering things that land managers and the public want, and that nature needs. It’s popular with senior officials and politicians and we all hope that it can either continue post 2025 or have elements of it brought into more mainstream agricultural support; this might include things like the advice and guidance staff in the Protected Landscape teams, and the local decision-making panel, including farmers and land managers, allocating funds. We’ve now supported 139 projects in the North Pennines, investing over £3.1m.

One of the potential targeting mechanisms for farm support is likely to be the Local Nature Recovery Strategies, or LNRS for short. Not only are we working to ensure our three county LNRS reflect the North Pennines National Landscape Management Plan, they will also need to reflect our cross-boundary Nature Recovery Plan (a process replicated in most other National Landscapes) on which we started work this year.

I hope that early in the New Year we’ll be able to send out some good news about our latest historic environment programme, The Land of Lead and Silver. This £2.6m project is the subject of a £1.7m bid to The National Lottery Heritage Fund for a programme of research, consolidation and interpretation of our world-class mineral mining heritage, something that’s at the heart of our UNESCO Global Geopark designation. Local volunteers and communities will be key to this new programme, fingers crossed for a positive result on the lottery funding to add to funds already secured from Historic England, with other bids in the pipeline.

You might see our work on the restoration of peatland, hay meadows and watercourses, our work to expand tree cover, or to support the farming and land management community, the consolidation of historic structures etc; you may come to Bowlees; or attend events and festivals; or follow one of our interpreted trails; or you might visit our website; or your school-age children may have had a visit from our team or been taken into the outdoors to experience fun and discovery in nature; but this is all underpinned by our finance, admin and comms staff, and the HR and admin staff at our host local authority, who you don’t see, but who keep the wheels turning. We would also like to thank our many excellent partners, including the neighbouring National Parks, our Great North Bog partners, RSPB, the Woodland Trust, Rivers Trusts, Natural England, farmers and land managers, local authorities and local heritage groups for all they have done for the North Pennines in 2023.