England's National Nature Reserves

Being a keen scythe user, and to tie in with my annual pilgrimage to the Green Scythe Fair in Somerset (https://scytheassociation.org/events/), I arranged to visit some of the NNRs to add to my website. This included two incredible hay meadows in south Somerset; Barrington Hill and Hardington Moor. It seemed very apt to be visiting some of the best hay meadows in the country after attending a scything festival.

These old hay meadow sites would have once been a common sight in the English countryside, before the introduction of artificial fertiliser and the move to single species grass lays. In the distant past they would have been managed by the use of the scythe rather than the tractor and mower, so the fields would not have all been mown at the same time, as they are today. Those that were cut early would have allowed butterflies like the meadow brown to lay its eggs on the freshly regrown grass, and those cut later through the year would have continued to provide flowers and nectar for a variety of insects, and cover for nesting birds such as skylark and curlew.

Whilst in Somerset I also managed to visit two of the recently created ‘Super’ National Nature Reserves; Mendips NNR and Somerset Wetlands NNR. These NNRs are an amalgamation of local sites, owned and managed by a variety of landowners. Super NNR’s have been developed by Natural England to galvanise landscape-scale nature recovery and deliver the nature conservation message of bigger, better and more joined up places for wildlife.

The Mendips NNR brings together nine land owning organisations covering over 1,400 hectares of land. It includes some stunning chalk grassland and ancient wooded ravines, which are strongholds for species such as the cheddar pink, adder and hazel dormouse.

The Somerset Wetlands NNR is even bigger and brings together six reserves totalling 6,140ha of land, making it England’s third largest NNR. As such it holds a third of the UK’s breeding bitterns and is attracting new breeding birds such as avocets, great white egrets and common cranes.

The size of these two sites stretching through Somerset all the way to the coast does inspire a feeling that conservation is really happening at a big scale in this part of the country.