This month we’ve been glad to receive visits from the Woodland Trust, Forest of Avon Trust, and Avon Wildlife Trust (also representing Buglife). The original aims of the landowners on taking over Kelston Roundhill were threefold: restore viable farming; improve biodiversity with good stewardship; and develop appropriate amenity use.

These visits have been focussed on the second of those: biodiversity. We planted 5500 trees in Barrows Style and elsewhere back in 2012. Now 12 years later our visitors from Woodland Trust and Forest of Avon commented on a largely successful and pleasingly diverse plantation, albeit with a regrettable share of dead or dying ash and all under sustained attack from male grey squirrels.

The idea is to prepare more formal management plans both for the trees and for the ground flora underneath. We’re just taking out the plastic tubes, and there may be some further interventions needed. There’s no particular business model for the plantation, but it’s increasingly pleasing and beautiful and it would be helpful to have a roadmap.

We like to accelerate the growth of wildflowers under the tree canopy both in the new plantation and in the clump itself. We’d like to restore what seem to be ancient ponds in Roundhill fields. So we look forward to seeing if these aims are in line with the objectives of these local NGOs and to what extent they can help with that.

Kerri from Avon Wildlife Trust walked over the species rich fields which the Trust surveyed 12 years ago. The Trust can help landowners with management plans and surveys.