Last week the volunteers and I began our search for Veteran trees in the Churnet Valley. With Kind permission of the Forestry Commission and Staffordshire wildlife trust’s reserves team, we began surveys at Dimmingsdale and Cotton Dell.
The surveys have gone well so far finding lots of notable trees and a few true veterans. The volunteers and I have enjoyed it greatly learning lots along the way and finding some really interesting features – as you can see from the pictures above we’ve also witnessed Mark’s amazing capacity to find himself inside, on or under numerous types of undergrowth with varying levels of prickliness.
Veteran Trees are those that because of their age are particularly important to wildlife and people. The Churnet valley is lacking in these big old valuable trees and so it is important to protect those that we do have as best we can.
That’s why the CVLLP is hosting this veteran tree project. We have a massive area to search so if people know of any very large or particularly old trees we would be really grateful for the information to help us in our search and people can contact me at i.kynaston@staffs-wildlife.org.uk
Also if anyone has any stories connected to special trees in the valley we would like to hear them.
