Wildlife group spend £40,000 on land at Stiperstones

Shropshire Wildlife Trust has purchased 16 acres of land on the Stiperstones, which adjoins their existing landholding at Nipstone Rock.

The land is next to the trust's nature reserve at Nipstone, where conifers were removed in 2000.

John Hughes, the trust's development manager, said they hope to fell the conifer plantation and turn the area back to heathland with their Back to Purple project.

He said: "Like many places along the Stiperstones ridge, we know it has mineshafts, so we need to find these and make them safe before we can commence work or allow people in, other than on the existing rights of way."

The Back to Purple heathland restoration project was probably the first landscape-scale conservation scheme in the country.

In 1998, a partnership of organisations including Shropshire Wildlife Trust, English Nature, the Forestry Commission and local landowners set out to restore heathland along the Stiperstones ridge.

Mr Hughes added: "It's very exciting. There is a lot of surviving heathland vegetation under the conifers and if we can remove the trees it will soon spread and become vigorous again."

Once covered from end to end in a carpet of heather, bilberry and cowberry, the Stiperstones ridge was, until the 1960s, one of the county's wildest uplands.

But extensive conifer plantation drastically altered the landscape and reduced the available habitat for wildlife.

The Back to Purple vision is that the emperor moth caterpillar may loop its way over the heather from one end of the Stiperstones ridge to the other unhindered. The trust says skylarks, meadow pipits and bumblebees will be winners too.

The trust will be working with the Forestry Commission to develop a plan for the new land.

"We need a licence to fell the trees but hope very much to start work in the autumn," said Mr Hughes.

"Funding for the purchase and future management of the land has been raised through grant funding from WREN Land Purchase Fund and donations totalling more than £22,000 from 426 individual supporters.

"The Stiperstones heathland restoration project at the turn of the millennium was our most ambitious undertakings.

"This pioneering scheme brought together Natural England, the Forestry Commission and local landowners to remove conifer plantations planted in the 1960s and restore the wild heathland that had flourished here previously.

"More than 175 acres of land have been restored to their former wild glory since the project began in 1998."