To mark the occasion, a 140 page, full colour book, titled: Reseeding: Restoring Wildness at Kielderhead Wildwood, has just been published.

The Kielderhead project, delivered in partnership with Forestry England, started five years ago as a vision to recreate an upland Scots pine and broadleaf woodland at Scaup Burn, the remotest part of England.

A woodland type that had been missing from the area for thousands of years, Scaup Burn is a site that contained potentially the only remnants of the Scots pine woodland that was considered extinct, outside of the Highlands of Scotland, 4500 years ago. 

The project, made possible thanks to National Lottery players via a grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, has now established a baseline of ecological information which provide invaluable for future ecological surveys made possible thanks to a team of volunteers who walked across the almost inaccessible Scottish border site to plant over 30,000 trees including 500 Scots pines, grafted and seeded from the original eight old pines.

The new book brings together the wide range of people who contributed to the project: scientists and conservationists, ecologists, historians, artists and writers who visited the site over the course of the past five years.

Each of the 17 chapters addresses the project from a different perspective and provides a rich and multifaceted account of the amazing area, the work that has taken place there and its wider human context and meaning. It is bursting with photographs, maps, photo diaries, and poems.

Graham Holyoak, Kielderhead Wildwood project coordinator says:

“For starters, the Wildwood project has been five years of working with brilliant volunteers, but it has also been a journey of discovery by working alongside artists, scientists, writers and historians.

“We were so lucky to receive support for the project from National Lottery players via The National Lottery Heritage Fund grant and to have been able to tell the story of our project in this wonderful book.”

Priced at £7.00, Reseeding: Restoring Wildness at Kielderhead Wildwood is available from Northumberland Wildlife Trust’s Wildlife Discovery Visitor Centre and Northumberlandia Visitor Centre. It is also available from Northumberland Wildlife Trust’s online shop www.nwt.org.uk/shop with an additional cost of £3.50 to cover postage and packaging. 

Anybody wanting to learn more about the Kielderhead Wildwood project can visit www.nwt.org.uk/what-we-do/projects/wildwood or watch project videos on YouTube at www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kielderhead+wildwood