Hello and welcome to the Wallington estate here in the heart of Northumberland.
For those visitors that are familiar with Wallington you'll recognise the house, its garden and grounds,
and also the wonderful river walk. But if you were to explore much further on the wider estate there's so much more to see.
At 20 square miles the Wallington estate is pretty unique in the National Trust. It involves 15 farms, we've got a whole variety of habitats
from woodlands and hedgerows through to moorland habitats. Wallington, like many parts across the country,
has seen biodiversity losses over the last 50 years, mainly through the intensification of farming.
But here at Wallington we feel really strongly that if we can work with our farm tenants
and introduce much more nature-friendly farming we can really play our part
improving biodiversity and combating climate change by restoring our peatland soils by planting trees, we can really make a difference.
Over the last year we've been provided with funding through the Green Recovery Challenge Fund of nearly £800,000
which has enabled us to work across four farms on the Wallington estate. Here we are looking to work very closely with the farm tenants
and help protect many of the stream sides which run across Wallington.
When storm Irwin hit in November 2021 it devastated Wallington's tree population. Winds of up to 98 miles an hour tore through the region
and we lost some 40 hectares of trees across the estate, the equivalent to 56 football pitches.
It's the worst storm damage we've seen here in 40 years, destroying scores of veteran trees
including 250 year-old oak trees and beech trees planted by Sir Walter Blackett.
The recovery process is just beginning but hopefully with tree planting projects that we've been undertaking this winter,
we can continue to replace the trees that we've lost in this storm and potentially future ones.
Here we are on the western boundary of the Wallington estate and the upper catchment of the Wansbeck.
Here you can see the trees are all protected with plastic guards, and we know that it's not
ideal to use plastic in Northern England where we've got quite harsh conditions.
These guards need to last for seven or eight years. But what we will do once they're ready,
we'll remove all the plastic guards and we'll take them off to be recycled.
What we're looking at here is a good example of some of the tree planting that we've been doing through the winter.
You'll notice the fencing in this particular instance is doing two jobs. It's protecting the newly planted trees and then what it's doing
also is actually keeping the livestock away from near the river and that stops soil erosion.
Here we've created a wildlife super highway. Essentially this is going to be, in time,
a corridor of which our red squirrel population from Harwood can find itself getting down here into the wider estate.
10 kilometres in all linking existing hedgerows, existing woodland, and tying it all together and really producing these corridors for wildlife.
Two apprentice Rangers, Rosie and Nick, have joined the Wallington team thanks to the Green Recovery Challenge Fund.
And since starting in March 2021 they've hit the ground running.
So today we've been tree planting with volunteers and visitors who've come along to help us plant some mixture of trees.
It's been really great to engage those people and get them really inspired into
loving nature and bringing up the next generation of nature lovers and tree planters essentially.
So all the work that we've done on the wider estate with all that fencing is all about keeping the sediment out of the water.
By doing that we can make the Wansbeck here much much cleaner.
As a result of that it can really really benefit our great population of white claw crayfish.
And how do we know it's good for the crayfish? Well what Matt does from time to time, Matt and the team,
is basically monitor. We're doing annual programmes of monitoring. We record the crayfish for health
and vitality, and so we've got a better understanding of what's happening with the population.
We're totally committed to doing what we can for nature, people, and climate. We're really excited about the journey that we're just beginning.
Bringing you closer to nature is one of the primary reasons for all of our work.
Without your support we just simply couldn't do it. So if you do see one of the Rangers working away
do stop and say hello and find out what work we're doing.