Breaking News Newsletter for Breaking New Ground Landscape Partnership Scheme

A Platform for Wildlife

Friends of Thetford Station applied for funds to improve understanding of the history and architecture of the old flint station building and create a new wildlife friendly green space for the station.

Raising awareness of the heritage value of the station building is a key part of the project. Built in 1845, the station is important as an example of local flint architecture. An additional grant from the Breckland Society will go towards providing an interpretation panel explaining the history and significance of the building.

The green areas next to the platforms will become wildlife-friendly zones, providing sources of food and shelter for insects and birds (the station is already home to a significant population of house sparrows, as well as tits and finch). The Friends plan several birdboxes and feeders as well as insect habitats in the form of "bug hotels" and log piles, mixed native hedging and wildlfower planting.

Flintstones

This is a project with St Mary’s West Stow Parish Council to repair three flint walls within the church yard. Volunteers of all ages will get together to clear up the church grounds and prepare the walls for restoration, and then work with a local flint expert to restore the walls.

Made from the Sands

This project aims to get people out exploring the built heritage of the Brecks who might not otherwise be able to. Project leader James Williamson will lead tours of some of the fascinating historic buildings in the Brecks from his specially equipped 4x4,

The vehicle can take up to 5 passengers and he’ll be working with local charities and organisations to offer tours to those who might not otherwise be able to get out and about due to mobility issues or special educational needs. Do get in touch if your organisation is keen to get involved!

Thetford Warren Lodge © English Heritage

Culford School

The school also has some old flint walls in need of restoration, so this project will provide training opportunities for pupils and local young people to learn how to repair them.

The school’s maintenance staff will also be trained, so that the walls can be maintained into the future.

A newsflash for project partners and participants with news items, project updates,

special features and forthcoming events.

June 2016

New People’s Pot Projects! We’re excited to be able to announce four new small grants scheme projects which are just getting underway.

Project Focus

B4: NBIS Little Ouse Wildlife Recording Festival

18th—26th June 2016: Along the River Ouse between Redgrave and Lopham Fen and Brandon Bridge The Little Ouse Wildlife Recording Festival focuses on recording the wildlife, both native and non-native, that lives along the river from Redgrave and Lopham Fen (the source of the river) through Thetford and on to Brandon Bridge. We need your help! —and have designed lots of great free activities to ensure that there is something suitable for all ages and levels of recording ability so everyone can get involved. How can you get involved? See the full programme and how to book.

Take the Little Ouse Recording Challenge Who will record the most species during the week? Can you record 100 species and help us reach an overall total of 500 species Download your recording card and instructions from the beginning of June; or pick up during the festival at sites listed at bottom of the page*

Take part in The BIG Little Ouse Bioblitz weekend 25-26th June at Blo’Norton Village Hall A team effort to record as many species as possible. Expert help with identification10am—3pm A weekend recording extravaganza hosted by the Little Ouse Headwaters Project Booking not necessary—just turn up! If you are able to come along and help out with the running of the day, do some recording, or are an expert who can help with ID or leading a walk, please complete our doodle poll, you can also offer your help for our other bioblitzes this year in the same doodle poll

Non-native Species Survey of the Little Ouse

Get out your kayak or canoe (or walk along the riverbank) and help us spot non-native wildlife along the river. We need as many people as possible to sign up to take on a section of the river to survey during this week. You can sign up HERE. View the river sections HERE. To learn how to identify non-native species and how to survey and sign up, come along to one of our free training sessions. Download your recording card from the beginning of June here. Take a Brecks Wildwalk along the Little Ouse River and record the wildlife you see For more information see our Brecks Wildwalks website

Help out with setting up trail camera traps for otters and other wildlife and reviewing the footage. More info soon... More information on this and all the other activities will be available on the website and via our email list - if you wish to keep up to date with these Little Ouse events and events during 2016 and early 2017 email us at nbis@norfolk.gov.uk

*Brandon Country Park; Santon Downham Forestry Commission; High Lodge; St Helen’s Picnic Site; Leaping Hare Tourist Information and BTO headquarters, Thetford; Knettishall Heath; Redgrave and Lopham Fen

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Events Coming Up:

Forest Fest: 3rd Jun, 10:30-3:30 Brandon Country Park

Sandlines Poetry Workshop: Writing From Dark Spaces 4th Jun Ancient House Museum 1:30-4

NBIS Wildlife Recording Festival: June 18th-26th, Little Ouse River, various locations

Summer Bees of the Brecks: 16-17th July, 10am-4pm Cranwich Heath. Booking essential

Find out more and book at http://www.breakingnewground.org.uk/events

Picture of

the Month Goshawk

chick, taken during the

installation of the nest cam

© Urban Forestry

Project Focus

C4: Wings Over The Brecks

Two of our Wings over the Brecks Nest Cams are now live! You can see goshawk nest cam being live streamed to the visitor Centre at High Lodge and the stone curlew cam at Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s Weeting Heath. Also, check out our website for clips from this year’s and last year’s nests.

Breaking New Ground

c/o Visitor Centre, Brandon Country Park, Bury Road, Brandon, Suffolk, IP27 0SU

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What the Brecks Means to Me...

Like most people, I love Breckland for the space

and the peace it provides, together with the many

opportunities it affords for enjoying wildlife – epitomised

by the cry of the curlew across the open heath. I also

relish the dramatic contrasts that exist in the landscape:

between what remains of the heaths and the sombre

masses of the Forestry Commission plantations; and

between both of these and the wide arable fields,

fringed by hawthorn hedges or lines of twisted pines.

For me, above all, Breckland is a landscape which,

while containing ancient features, is a mainly modern

creation, and one which, although rich in wildlife, is in

every way highly unnatural. It encapsulates, moreover,

the important principle that the most interesting

landscapes, and certainly the most fast-changing, are

to be found in the most agriculturally marginal areas.

The Breckland heaths may to an extent represent

survivals from the natural vegetation but their

completely treeless character, attained by the end of

the Middle Ages, was created and sustained by the

grazing of sheep and rabbits and the regular cutting of

vegetation. The latter was carried out with such

intensity that manorial regulations were often drawn up

to preserve gorse as shelter for the sheep flocks, or –

as at Thetford in the sixteenth century - to limit the

amount of bracken that individuals could cut. Most of

the heaths were, however, reclaimed during the

agricultural revolution period of the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, as more and more of the land in

the district fell into the hands of large landed estates.

Much of the Breckland landscape was formed at this

time. The contorted pine rows, for example, all appear

to have been planted, originally as hedges, in the early

nineteenth century and mainly in the years between

1815 and 1830. It is striking that something so recent in

date, and now outgrown and redundant, should have

become an icon of the district. The agricultural

depression from the late 1870s brought this period of

large estates and ‘improvement’ to an end, and in the

early twentieth century Breckland became a

byword for agricultural dereliction. The

Forestry Commission plantations established

in the 1920s and 30s were planted on

abandoned arable land as much as on surviving heaths

and warrens.

None of these successive landscapes was in any

meaningful sense ‘natural’. All were shaped by the

attempts of individuals and societies to wrest an

economic return from this dry and sandy land. When

the great pine plantations began to be established in

the 1920s there was an outcry from conservationists,

and the strips of deciduous woodland planted beside

the principal public roads were in part intended to

reduce the visual impact of the ‘serried rows of

conifers’, although their main purpose seems to have

been to act as fire breaks. When first planted, the pines

certainly reduced biodiversity but now that the age

structure of the plantations is more varied, with many

mature stands of trees, the contrast with the heaths in

terms of wildlife conservation is much less.

Visitors now enjoy and appreciate the forests just as

much, one suspects, as those in the 1920s did the

heaths and warrens. But the real beauty of the Brecks

is that we still have both habitats, and much more, in

such close proximity. These are the kinds of issues,

contrasts and paradoxes which make Breckland so

fascinating to me.

Prof. Tom Williamson,

University of East Anglia

Landscape Revolutions project

Get your project noticed!: If there is something that you would like included in the next newsletter,

please send details to Amy by 24nd June: BNG.Admin@suffolk.gov.uk