Caledonia’s lost forest to be restored to glory in £23m rewilding

Ancient woodland will be pieced back together as part of Europe-wide project that will give endangered species their habitats back

Robin McKie, Science Editor

Sun 7 Oct 2018 07.00 BST

Only a few tattered scraps of woodland in the Cairngorms provide evidence that a vast forest once covered the Scottish Highlands and much of the rest of the nation. This vast arboreal canopy provided homes for wolves, lynx, elks and many other species.

Land clearances for farming, and felling trees for timber, destroyed most of that habitat hundreds of years ago, leaving only a few disconnected fragments of land to provide shelter for dwindling numbers of animals.

But conservationists believe they may soon be able to restore a substantial chunk of this lost landscape and bring Caledonia’s beleaguered forest back to some of its ancient glory. A £23m Endangered Landscapes Programme (ELP)has selected the remains of the Caledonian Forest to be the focus of a key restoration project – along with seven other major regeneration schemes – to restore Europe’s most threatened environments.

 “The aim of the Scottish project is to connect up the fragments of Caledonian Forest with land that is no longer degraded – as it is at present – so that threatened species can communicate and move around,” said Jeremy Roberts, of the RSPB, one of the major groups involved in the Cairngorms Connect project.

“We are also going to provide restored habitats for threatened species that include rare sphagnum mosses, sundews, dragonflies and damson flies. It is going to be the biggest habitat restoration project in Britain. We will be working on more than 600 square kilometres of land.”

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