Rich & Varied Wildlife

Skylarks and barn owls are the headline acts, but they're far from the whole story. This land supports a genuinely diverse, thriving ecosystem, and we have the evidence to prove it.
 

A Single Day, A Remarkable Tally

In 2019, this farm hosted an ecological survey carried out with the National Farmers' Union, bringing in ecologists and botanists to record what was actually living here. In just one day, they found:

• 168 plant species, including the rare Twayblade orchid

• 96 animal species, including nationally scarce beetles

• 46 bird species, among them several Red List species: skylark, yellow hammer, linnet, song thrush, and tree sparrow
   

That's not a typo, and it's not a one-off lucky find. It's what happens when a working farm has been managed with nature in mind for decades: semi-improved meadows, old orchards, field-margin habitat, hedgerows left to do their job, and pools and woodland edges that haven't been tidied away.
 

Why This Matters

A single day's survey, by definition, can't catch everything. Species that weren't active that day, weren't yet flowering, or simply weren't spotted in the time available will be missing from this list, which means the true picture of what lives here is very likely even richer than these numbers show.
 

This isn't marginal, low-value land waiting for a better use to come along. It's a functioning, biodiverse landscape, exactly the kind of habitat that's becoming harder to find in the British countryside, and exactly the kind of place that, once industrialised, doesn't come back.
 

The Full Picture

Alongside this wider survey, more recent and more targeted work has confirmed what's living here right now: eight skylark breeding territories, and a barn owl roost that's been active for generations. Together, the evidence builds a clear and consistent picture, this is a site that matters, ecologically, on every measure we've been able to test.