Believe it or not, there was once a rainforest covering a fifth of Britain (this country does, after all, get ridiculous amounts of wet weather). But we don’t mean the tropical kind you find in Australia or South America — we’re talking about temperate rainforests.
Temperate rainforests are super rare and only occur in places close to the sea with high rainfall, high humidity and low variations in temperature.
In 2024 only small pockets of the UK’s rainforest, known at the Atlantic or Celtic rainforest, remain. But campaigners have been trying to change that and the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales has just announced its plans recover and revive its section of the woodland.
The restoration will take place across a 146-acre site in Pembrokeshire, including the Gwaun valley. The plans involve planting species like oak, small-leaf lime and wild service to become a support an abundance of other flora and fauna. The trees will be placed around two standing stones to mimic clearings that might have been created by our prehistoric ancestors.
Adam Dawson, a senior conservation officer at the WTSWW, told the Guardian: ‘It will probably look not dissimilar to neolithic times when our ancestors were first creating woodland clearings. It’s bringing it back to what happened before we got so clever and became too sedentary, when we were still relatively nomadic.
‘I think that’s a time in history when we were very much connected with the landscape and connected with the seasons and our lives were very much dictated by those. We respected nature in a way that we’ve lost sight of.’
The project is part of the Wildlife Trust’s wider 100-year Atlantic rainforest recovery programme, which has been boosted by a whopping £38 million donation from insurance company, Aviva.
Britain's natural beauty
There’s been lots of good news for UK wildlife lately. There are plans to create London’s largest nature reserve, reintroduce storks to the capital and create a huge new ‘super reserve’ in Somerset. On top of those, the UK is getting a new national park, wildcats were recently introduced in Devon and Cornwall and the Lake District was recently named one of the best natural heritage site in the UK.
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