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There is more than a hint of time travel about Gwent Wildlife Trust’s
latest bold venture to ensure that wildlife will still be around to be
enjoyed by our children’s children. The Trust has bought 104 acres of well-managed dairy pasture – a
monoculture of rye-grass – and will create woodland and grassland, full of
flowers, insects and birds, managed by free-ranging livestock.
This will produce a wood-pasture landscape, dating back to the ‘open forest’
wildwood of Neolithic Britain, but which continued to be found as Wyeswood Common in the Trellech Ridge up until the late 19th century.
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So why is this land so important to GWT?
It can show what is possible when nature is given a
blank canvas. Together with Pentwyn Farm Reserve, it will make up GWT’s largest
reserve.
It will link Pentwyn Farm’s 40 acres of species rich grasslands with the surrounding
scatter of small islands of old grassland, and connect these habitats to
the Wye Valley woodlands. It would establish vital wildlife corridors
for species such as dormouse.
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The project represents cutting-edge conservation
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