By Charles Tomalin
Transition King’s Cliffe Wildplaces
For nearly 10 years the Wildplaces volunteer group has been very actively managing habitats around the village to support the wonderful biodiversity of the area. This has included opening up public access to the village's wildlife sites - roughly 50 acres of accessible land that are now managed or maintained primarily for wildlife.
You can read more about the group’s work here.
In 2024 the Wildplaces group were awarded funds from Rockingham Forest Vision's Community Grant Scheme and here the group’s lead, Charles Tomalin, reports on what the funds have enabled them to do.
Our application for grant funding in October 2023 covered two main areas of activity – improving various signage and supporting our project to more fully understand our population of Adders.
Signs on the Railway Path
Until 1966 a single-track railway ran through this part of Rockingham Forest with stations at Wansford, Nassington, Kings Cliffe and Wakerley. We have managed to open up a 2-mile section of the track for walkers. Now, starting at King's Cliffe Active, you can walk west through the old railway cutting as far as Wood Lane with access then to Fineshade Wood. Otherwise you can head east and enjoy the views towards Apethorpe, Jacks Green and beyond. (More detail here )
We used some of the grant to procure and install aluminium signs along the Railway Path, to improve visibility of the route and confirm the permissive-path nature of the route.
Signs of Adders
We also put up a number of signs to advise the public of the areas where our main adder populations might be encountered. This is invaluable as dog walkers use a number of these areas and the signs serve as both warning to keep dogs under close control, but also to advise of the protected nature of these creatures.
Millennium Wood Tree Trail
This 10-acre woodland is owned and managed by the Woodland Trust. It was planted with help from the village in 2000, and has already developed into a wonderful area, alive with insects and birds. A real highlight is the appearance of the marbled white butterflies in the summer.
With the assistance of the Woodland Trust, we have had designed and delivered 16 tree-identification and woodland-information signs, with substantial oak posts, for installation within Millennium Wood. As well as giving useful information about various species and management processes within the wood, they provide a QR code link to the Woodland Trust website for further information. Our next job on this project is to produce a ‘Tree trail’ leaflet, to encourage young visitors to explore the wood to find all the panels.
Meadow Junction Interpretation Board
There was formerly a Victorian brick-built bridge spanning the Railway Path, and very sadly ‘Meadow Bridge’ had to be demolished recently. With a herculean effort the TKC Wildplaces group has used the bricks the create safe walkways.
We commissioned an information board to be installed at the original site. This sign gives some history of the railway line and the resulting permissive path, as well as recording the bridge itself and the work undertaken by local volunteers to enable the public to use the access. The board was delivered in October and we will be scheduling the volunteers to install it as soon as possible.
The Adder Project
To improve and increase our capacity for surveying our critical Adder population, we have purchased large numbers of new refugia sheets. These are more resilient than the existing ones, which have been prone to damage from weather, and also from grazing sheep who enjoy standing on them!
We have had half a dozen or so volunteers in the village helping with the surveys this year, and have identified 24 different individual adders which we can now monitor over the next few years.
Also, with the assistance of ecology consultant Nigel Hand we acquired new radio tags for our Adders. Nigel is recognised as the leading expert in the UK on Adder ecology, and specifically radio tracking. He attended over a weekend in May and was successful in attaching tags to four adult snakes (three males and one female). With our existing telemetry equipment we were then able to monitor the movement of these individuals over a ten-week period as they migrated around the village in the breeding season.
Surprisingly, the males did not move very far. We had expected them to travel up to 400m in search of females, but they actually kept within a 30m radius of the original tagging location. This suggests that, not only is there a good local supply of food and appropriate shelter, but that we may actually have a higher density of females in those areas than we had realised so that the males did not need to range very far to find mates.
Our Adder project lead, Ian Froggatt, is producing a full report on this work, with conclusions and recommendations, which will be forwarded to ARG UK, to help plan for future projects. Click here for more information about the wider endangered Adder population in Northamptonshire.
And finally
We were very grateful for the funding supplied from the Heritage Lottery Fund through Rockingham Forest Vision, which has provided the capital expenditure for these projects.
However, none of the projects could have been carried out without the commitment of time and labour from our amazing team of local volunteers. Do check out our website and Facebook pages if you live locally and would like to help out as we move forward to more exciting ventures. You’d be most welcome!
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