Help your hedgerows!

Keep Wales Tidy are calling on people from all walks of life to volunteer for a new project they are running in the Brecon Beacons National Park.

‘The Long Forest project’ is involving a wide community in caring for the network of hedgerows that form an important landscape feature of the magnificent Brecon Beacons National Park.

Funded jointly by the Brecon Beacons Trust and the Sustainable Development Fund, the 21-month Long Forest project encourages community volunteers to take an active interest in farm, garden and wayside hedgerows.

It is hoped that groups and schools will also plant new native-species hedges, infill gaps in existing hedgerows, create tree-lines, clear a local hedge of trapped litter, learn traditional hedge-laying or talking with local farming families about old hedging tools and practice traditional to different parts of the National Park. Others are sharing jam-making skills using hedgerow fruits (leaving some as food for wildlife of course) or keeping a ‘hedgerow blog’.

Many groups are guided in identifying and recording plants and animals that live in, on, under or above mixed hedges – or use them as a safe route from one place to another.

Well managed, native-species hedgerows are an asset to local farms and a crucial habitat for wildlife including declining species like the hedgehog and yellowhammer and rarities like the dormouse and lesser horseshoe bat.

Community groups, schools, farmers, landowners, businesses, specialists and local authorities are encouraged to work together and explore options for managing hedges in realistic, cost-effective ways so that they offer maximum benefit to farm livestock and to wildlife – and look attractive in the landscape.

Dan Snaith, Keep Wales Tidy’s Project Officer covering the Carmarthenshire area of the National Park, says:

“The Long Forest project is a great opportunity to get more people to notice, appreciate and help care for our wonderful hedgerows. We are helping to pass on some of the fine agricultural traditions of the Brecon Beacons to more of the younger generation, and volunteers are adding to the surprisingly low number of records of hedgerow wildlife in the Park. The project is also championing the native-species garden hedge as an attractive, useful and wildlife-friendly feature.”

Peter Ogden, Chair of the Brecon Beacons Trust, points out:

“The direct involvement of local people in caring for the very special environment within the Park is essential if the quality of life it provides is to be maintained for future generations.”

Alongside the litter clean-ups for which it’s so well-known, Keep Wales Tidy supports community volunteers and school pupils to undertake a variety of projects across Wales to improve the local environment for people and wildlife.

The Long Forest project is open to all who live, work or study within the boundaries or catchment area of the Brecon Beacons National Park. To find out more, contact: Dan Snaith on 07824 504805 / daniel.snaith@keepwalestidy.org or rachel.palmer@keepwalestidy.org 07717 497 442