Blog: Miterdale through the seasons
January: New Year, New Jobs, New Beginnings
Two new members of staff joined the Nature Rich Miterdale team before Christmas and enjoyed a warm welcome from new colleagues in the local team, from University of Leeds, and from volunteers. With Jack and Katherine having been promoted to Project Officers, Tom and Francesca joined the team as Assistant Project Officers.
Tom was raised mostly in Kent but has lived all over the world and has spent many years as a self-employed coppice worker. He is full of innovative ideas, and you won’t experience a dull conversation with him! Tom has boldly entered the competitive arena of baking flapjack for volunteers, hot on the heels of Jack at NRM and John at Restoring Hardknott Forest. 
Francesca was born and raised in Cumbria (despite not having the accent) and has moved around the country working as a ranger for several different organisations. Francesca has mostly worked on hay meadows and deciduous woodland so is looking forward to learning about the montane environment. She is resisting all pressure to bake flapjack as the competition is far too stiff!
The new teammates chose an excellent time of year to join the project with two Christmas get togethers on the cards. The annual Wild Christmas meetup in Yorkshire was a great chance for Tom and Francesca to meet team members from other projects ran by University of Leeds, as well as researchers, PhD students, trustees and more. We met Liz Coates and colleagues at Wild Ingleborough to see their brilliant set up for their montane plant nursery, where we were envious of their automated watering system. Day two took us to the Snaizeholme Estate. The famous Yorkshire weather wasn’t kind to us so we were more than happy to keep warm by building tree cages. We were even happier to take advantage of their beautifully renovated, cosy barn for lunch time!
The second Christmas shindig was much closer to home and involved delicious grub at the Brook House Inn at Boot before a head-torch lit dash in the dark up to beautiful Burnmoor Lodge for the night. A chilly but peaceful treat as it’s members only!
January has now brought bitter, biting weather – it didn’t get the memo about the warm welcome. Time to crack on with the work! There’s plenty of it – fence repairs, dry stone wall gaps, checking camera traps, tree planting, and tree tube removal. Noisiest of all is hopping on the chainsaws to remove unwanted species like Sitka spruce which has escaped its commercial forestry bounds, and rhododendron. Now we come to the crux of the matter. Tom and Francesca’s main focus is on removing Rhododendron ponticum as it is merrily spreading along the valley. Although pretty when in flower, it’s invasive and fast spreading: shading out our native species, changing the pH of the soil, and taking over woodlands at an impressive rate. Rhododendron is a resilient foe and will grow back if you just cut it down, so requires lots of attention. The team have their work cut out - literally. Bring on the Rhody bashing!
Francesca Dearden, Assistant Project Officer
JULY: The buzzing and baaing of summer
It has been great to see some progress with the re-building of our boundary fences over the last couple of months in Miterdale. With the help of local contractors, we have so far (almost) completed 3,615 meters of fencing, in, over and through rough ground and dense bracken. We have also secured a brave contractor for the most difficult fence on our patch, which will bring the total up to 5,615 meters. This is a crucial, and probably the most difficult job we have in Miterdale, but will be essential to the restoration of these clear-fell areas.
Students from local schools: Gosforth Primary and Waberthwaite have become masters of dexterity by removing thousands of plastic tree tubes from the fell, with an unbeaten record of nesting 14 tree tubes inside each other! With well-earned breaks paddling in the river Mite and making tarpaulin mansions among the trees, hopefully making their contributions in Miterdale memorable.
We’ve also had a great bunch of hard-working locals out on our regular volunteer days where we have been trying to expand the SSSI woodland by protecting native regen trees, particularly Oak and Hazel, with bio-degradable tree-tubes or ‘Rainbow’ tubes. We have protected 200 regen trees in this important area so far! Being from a local seed source and adapted to the area, these trees should shoot up!
For areas lacking a seed source, we have been filling up our tree nursery with over 5000 sapling trees that we were donated. We now have plenty of oak, alder, birch and aspen ready for this winter’s planting season. Come and help us plant them!
APRIL: Winter into Spring...
Over the last month, the usual peace and tranquillity in Miterdale has been temporarily interrupted by two separate chainsaw contractors who have been working hard to remove large non-native Sitka Spruce trees from an area below Great Bank. This has already revealed a developing Birch woodland with some good Holly understory; now flooded with sunlight! This has also given us a steady supply of timber that we can use for fenceposts and rails in the future – Thanks to the Coppice Coop and Rob!
We started 2025 with 6000 sapling tree (Thanks to The Woodland Trust!) including: Oak, Hazel, Hawthorn, Rowan, Aspen, Birch, Alder, Blackthorn, Elder, Guelder Rose, Dog Rose and Willow. With a big push from some good people through March, we have now got them all in the ground in both the lowland areas and upper reaches of Miterdale – a big thanks to all those who helped with the planting!
We now have a small window to protect these newly planted trees from grazing animals – particularly sheep! With lambing time upon us, the great ‘gather’ of Miterdale and Eskdale common will clear out all the sheep in our exclosure areas and allow us some time to close off all of the gaps in our fences without trapping any sheep in!
Alongside the many many practical jobs to do, the months ahead will involve lots of ecological monitoring, such as breeding bird surveys, adder surveys, butterflies, squirrel monitoring and much more! We also have some more school visits from St Bega’s, Gosforth Primary and Waberthwaite School which always provide a fun days out!
JANUARY: Autumn into Winter...
Our first couple of months were spent walking the Miterdale valley – surveying fence and wall lines for their condition and mapping the presence of non native regeneration (mainly conifer and rhodedendron).
Since then it's been a time of transition in Miterdale – we’ve tried to hit the ground running, building an understanding of the valley and what it may need, planning the next years work, moving from autumn colour into the pale light of winter. We’ve been enjoying visualising what the valley might look like after 10, 20, 30 years of nature recovery; a landscape full of native broadleaf woodland, mosaic scrub and grassland, montane scrub on the crags, and abundant wildflowers.
We’ve been drawing up the biggest fencing and felling jobs to be done by professionals – and starting to tackle the rest ourselves. We’re so grateful to all our volunteers who joined us in 2024 – sawing Sitka spruce, winching rhododendron and planting trees!
We’re now also looking towards the spring and the rest of the year by developing our monitoring plan – to further our understanding of the species present in the valley, monitor success of initiatives like tree planting, and allow us to make well informed decisions over the next few years
OCTOBER: Nature Rich Miterdale - The first few weeks...
Standing in the valley bottom of Miterdale in the first week of September, Katherine and I scan the towering stands of windblown conifers; the understory interrupted with glints of illuminous greens and dots of white that can only be Rhododendron and sheep.
The sense of anticipation of starting our new roles in the Nature Rich Miterdale project is suddenly replaced by a concoction of excitement and overawing. The possibilities for nature recovery here is palpable and its position in west Cumbria heightens its strategic importance as a connecting corridor route between existing conservation efforts from Ennerdale to the Duddon valley. The opportunities for engaging and involving the local community in this valuable project adds to our excitement. But at this moment on our first day, glaring back at us is the sheer scale of what needs to be achieved for this project to be successful.
Where to begin? In the words of Johnny Cash, we walk the line. With approximately 30km of boundary fences that separate our project area from open areas of common and farmed land, we spend our first month surveying the current condition of these lines on the map. The results reveal there's plenty to do... A large amount of the fences have collapsed due to their age and many have had several tonnes of North American timber crashing on top of them. This has allowed a lot of sheep ingress over the years and has resulted in previous attempts at replanting clear felled areas unsuccessful. With a good understanding of which boundaries to repair first, and with the help of the local farm, we are beginning to deposit materials around the valley where we need them.
Getting involved
As well as getting to know the valley and its boundaries, we have been initiating relationships with local groups, schools and organisations to help promote our ambitions in Miterdale and to foster an engagement with anybody who would like to be involved. With the support of the National Trust, we held our first volunteer work party at Rough How on the 16th of October. We removed 8 tonne-bags worth of degraded and rotten tree tubes out of bogs (where they shouldn’t be!) and removed over 40 Sitka spruce trees that had inconveniently regenerated. Thank you to Francesca and Jon for helping to organise the day and a big shoutout to the volunteers who attended, making the first of many more enjoyable days of restoration work.