In the North Pennines there will be a nature-rich network of habitats, extending from the fell tops to the valley bottoms and out to the Pennine fringe, where wildlife can thrive alongside people who live and work in this landscape. It will be a place where people from all backgrounds enjoy the area for its intrinsic beauty through many more opportunities to connect with nature.
This connected and wildlife-rich landscape will help protect us from flood risk, absorb carbon and help mitigate against the effects of climate change, providing us all with plentiful clean water and air, and good food produced on farmland with flourishing wildlife. Farmers and other land managers will be supported to provide these public goods and to develop new economic activity which is consistent with this vision.
The area will become an exemplar of good practice for sustainable upland land management, with healthy ecosystems underpinning thriving rural businesses and communities, and providing a range of wider public benefits.
The peatland on the moorland top will be wet. Sphagnum mosses will cover the greatest area of ground but species such as sundews, bog rosemary, cotton grasses and cranberry will also be common.
A variety of dwarf shrubs, bryophytes and cloudberry will also be common on blanket bog, and shrubs like eared and tea-leaved willows will be colonising below the deeper peat.
Heathland habitats will have been restored over areas of former conifer plantation, and several former ‘grass moorlands’ too. A variety of grazing animals, including hardy native cattle, small flocks of sheep, and some of the naturally present roe deer, alongside an absence of rotational cutting or burning, mean that this vast, connected mosaic of dwarf shrubs, species-rich ‘lawns’, wet flushes, and scrub, will provide a constantly evolving interface between blanket bog above and grassland and wooded habitats below. Many more areas of heather will grow tall and senesce naturally, and amongst the heather there will be a good coverage of other dwarf shrubs such as bilberry, crowberry and cowberry. Wildfire risk will be suppressed through rising water tables and coordinated management of grazing and firebreaks.
This mosaic of scrub, dwarf shrubs, grassland and bog will provide niches and stepping-stone habitat for many species of plants, invertebrates, reptiles, amphibians and birds, including some of our champion (and/or Annex 1) species - adder, bilberry bumblebee, black grouse, cuckoo, curlew, dunlin, green hairstreak, golden plover, large heath butterfly, merlin and ring ouzel.
Birds of prey such as hen harrier and peregrine will also thrive across the moorlands and will no longer suffer illegal persecution.
Waders such as curlew, lapwing, redshank and snipe will find good feeding areas and breeding habitat in the wet, open and flat ground at this moorland edge, and below on rushy pasture, where additional habitat creation such as scrapes will benefit them.
On the lower fellsides and in the dales, scattered and once isolated woodlands will be better connected through developing areas of scrub and woodland and the reinstatement of hedgerows along old field lines. Open wooded pasture will also be more common here.
There will be more natural colonisation of trees and scrub, assisted by lower levels of browsing and grazing and sometimes hand dispersal of seed. Where planting it is needed, compostable guards, high density planting and thorny nurse crops will be used to avoid introducing more plastic into the landscape.
Much more scrub will exist in the landscape, particularly on steeper slopes where bracken once dominated the fellside and extending up many gills towards the peatland and moorland top. Many more of our rivers and streams will benefit from shade provided by developing scrub and woodland.
Non-native gamebirds will be in much lower numbers in this landscape and not released or fed near to sensitive sites, allowing reptile populations and specialist invertebrate species to re-establish in suitable former locations.
Becks, gills and sikes, and the rivers they feed, will have clean water with more natural levels of nutrients and lower levels of human-made chemicals. There will be little remaining sign of human-made modification, and they will have well-developed bankside vegetation. They will form a mosaic with associated pools and wetlands in valley bottoms, which together will support varied and thriving plant and animal communities, including white-clawed crayfish, dragonflies, amphibians and water voles.
Our most species-rich areas of grasslands, including upland hay-meadows and limestone grasslands, will still support specialist plants, invertebrates and fungi, through careful management.
Important limestone grasslands and associated base-rich flushes on higher ground, will have been restored to a more herb-rich sward through careful grazing management and monitoring, so that specialist plants such as Teesdale violet, spring gentian, yellow marsh saxifrage and moonwort thrive again.
Around these species-rich islands, agricultural grasslands which have long since lost their diversity will be more wildflower rich, having been restored through a variety of techniques including overseeding using local seed or green hay. Changes in pasture management will also have developed a more a healthy soil microbiome with more microbial activity, and more fungal and invertebrate diversity. Road verges will be showing a slow revival of floral diversity following new management to collect the cuttings for composting locally after flowers have set seed. Ground nesting birds will be thriving in these species-rich grasslands where their needs for breeding and feeding are being taken into account.