Woodland project grows on wildlife as birds put down roots

TEN years ago it was a barren glen, bare of trees and devoid of wildlife. Now – thanks to an ambitious tree-planting project to restore the landscape to its former glory – Carrifran in the Moffat Hills is teeming with rare birds and native species.

• Carrifran is once again home to a thriving population of black grouse. Picture: Ian Rutherford

The 665-hectare ice-carved valley in southern Scotland, is home to a thriving population of rare black grouse, golden eagles, peregrines and buzzards.

Where it was once populated only by sheep, cattle and feral goats, it now attracts woodland birds including reed buntings and willow warblers.

The success of the Carrifran Wildwood project after just ten years has been praised by wild land groups, who say it is one of the first examples of work to successfully restore an area of the country to the landscape that existed centuries ago.

The glen, which rises from Moffatdale to the summit of White Coomb, was bought in 2000 for almost 400,000 after a major fundraising drive that attracted donations from about 1,500 people.

A private donor agreed to pay for half a million trees and now there are parts of the glen where birch, rowan and aspen stand 20 feet tall, although many of the 500,000 trees are still just knee high. Sessile oak, downy birch, rowan, alder, ash and holly, bird cherry and wych elm are thriving, while montane goat willow, aspen and juniper have been planted on the higher slopes.

Andrew Campbell, head of land management at wild land charity John Muir Trust, which has supported the project, said the people behind the scheme, many of them volunteers, deserved huge praise.

"It's a fantastic example of how it is possible to take a piece of hill land and over a relatively short space of time put that back into ecologically far better health than it was in the first place," he said.

"I think it has been hugely successful in expanding the area of native woodlands across Scotland and giving an opportunity for a range of species and habitats to develop."

Philip Ashmole, a volunteer coordinator of the Carrifran Wildwood project, said it was still too early to see the full effects of the tree planting.

But the zoologist from Peebles, writing in the magazine of charity Reforesting Scotland, added: "As our second decade dawns, we are reasonably confident that Carrifran Wildwood will provide a long-term demonstration of the power of practical people with a bit of vision acting together and gaining the support of people from far afield, to reverse on a local scale the tide of environmental devastation engulfing so much of the world."

More than 95 per cent of native woodlands have been lost in southern Scotland, often replaced by barren land grazed by sheep.

Borders Forest Trust, behind the Carrifran Wildwood project, has even more ambitious plans for the future.

Last year the trust bought the Devil's Beef Tub, a dramatic hollow once used to hide stolen cattle, and all of Corehead, north of Moffat. The Corehead site is the same size as Carrifran and just over a mile away, and Borders Forest Trust is already pressing ahead with a similar replanting scheme.