Great North Fen, UK - whole catchment vision for restoring lost fen landscapes

The Great North Fen is an ambitious legacy project to restore 400 hectares of historic fenland across the River Skerne catchment in County Durham, UK. Over centuries, agricultural activities have extensively drained the fen and carr woodland landscape and the rivers have undergone significant straightening. Today, the landscape has become difficult for modern agriculture due to frequent flooding and rising groundwater levels following the cessation of coal mining.

The objectives of the Great North Fen are to find ways to restore an interconnected mosaic of river, pond, fen and carr habitat in ways that landowners will support. This means attracting suitable environmental payments and looking for new ways to generate income from the land - through eco-tourism, conservation grazing, and rediscovering the lost cultural history of the landscape.

The four sites covered by this project form part of the wider vision for the catchment aiming to create a landscape which is better adapted to present and future needs; a new normal. The four sites have been taken through various stages of design, from concept, through to optioneering and detailed design, and also include Biodiversity Net Gain assessments. The first site, comprising 24 hectares of traditional floodplain wetland, is due for construction in autumn 2020.

In addition to the project objectives, constraints such as land use, access requirements and infrastructure were considered in order to develop options for each site. Restoration proposals across the sites include channel re-meandering and provision of backwaters to promote morphological processes and to enhance aquatic habitat within the river. Embankment removal is proposed at each site in order to improve floodplain connectivity, therefore enabling re-creation of the desired wetland habitats, such as lowland fen, floodplain scrapes and floodplain grazing meadow. Additionally, water quality is a limiting factor within the catchment owing to agricultural nature of the area. As a result, opportunities to improve the diversity of the riparian corridor are proposed to help limit diffuse pollutants entering the channel. The project also aspires to look at catchment scale opportunities to improve water quality through the management of diffuse pollutants by utilising NFM features and best land management practices.