There are quite a few piles of rubble in the graveyard and instead of breaking our backs taking it all to the dump, we decided to build a hibernaculum! A What?? Yes, I think I’ve spelt that right! It’s an area of rough ground with stones, sticks and rubbly bits built up and piled over with soil. With lots of air pockets any little animal can creep in to take cover from the cold or wet or even decide to hibernate for the coldest months.

The great thing for us is that this little bit of tidying up has achieved so much!

Looking after the wildlife

Hopefully creating someting interesting for passers-by to look and wonder at

And we’ve tidied the graveyard up!

This morning we were delighted to meet Sophie Brown from the South Downs National Park. We are very aware that there are an amazing range of resources in our area to support and advise us and Sophie arrived full of enthusiasm for our vision and with the wherewithall to help us achieve it. She provided loads of ideas of how to harness the enthusiasm of locals and also has put us in touch with various bodies that may be able to help with grants and specific knowledge of hedging, flowers, wildlife, lichen …..

This is the email just received: 

From: Sophie Brown <Sophie.Brown@southdowns.gov.uk>
Date: 4 September 2020 at 11:47:06 BST
To: “hil@theforageyard” <hil@theforageyard.co.uk>
Subject: Visit today 

Hi Hilly, 

It was lovely to meet the four of you today. I think St Nics churchyard will be a really interesting place for wildlife and it sounds like you all already have some great ideas. I agree with you that raking off the cuttings is a good place to start to reduce the nutrient input into the soil. This in turn will give less of a boost to the dominant grasses and allow more wildflowers to come through, like the lady’s bedstraw and yarrow we saw today. By reducing the number of times the church yard is cut, as well as potentially cutting less tightly to the ground, the wildflowers will have more time to flower, providing that valuable nectar and pollen source, and then also set seed to provide more wildflowers for following years.

Have you heard of ‘Caring for God’s Acre’? It’s a fantastic charity and provides great advice and communication between churchyards. Here’s their website:

https://www.caringforgodsacre.org.uk/  

We also spoke about increasing wildflowers at St Nics by planting plugs. It’s great that you’ve used this as a way to engage with the local community by asking the local children to plant the primroses. A mixture of cowslips and primroses is a good way to add some variety. I would encourage trying to source native species where possible, but understand it isn’t always that easy. We had a brief chat about the importance to pollinators that there is year round food sources, provided in a way that can cater to different insects. 

I’ve had a look to see if we have a record of lichen surveys undertaken in Lavant, but unfortunately we don’t. I think the best way to find more information out about this would be to get in touch with the British Lichen Society (https://www.britishlichensociety.org.uk), the Sussex representative is Simon Davey (srdavey@globalnet.co.uk). 

We discussed planting a hedge along the northern fence, which will to provide a long term boost for wildlife and is a way to appropriately plant trees which can then help in the reduction of CO2. It might also be worth considering whether tree guards could not be used as there didn’t seem to be rabbits present on site. We usually use Mill Farm Plants as they do a native hedgeplant mixhttps://www.millfarmtrees.co.uk/hedging-plants-c1/native-farm-hedging-p25. You mentioned, however, that you might be able to source some hedge plants from another project? If you need support in sourcing plants/funding/knowing how best to plant the hedge, please do get in touch and we will do what we can to support this. Unfortunately the Trees for the Downs project I mentioned is closed now. I can add your email to the notification list for next year if you think there maybe projects it would be useful for? 

We were talking about the different ways we can engage with local people to explain what is being done at the churchyard and the benefits of what superficially appears to be quite messy. If you do wish for further support regarding signage and a biobloitz (pandemic allowing!) please do get in touch. I would also be interested to hear the talk being put together for spring if you wouldn’t mind letting me know when that plans on going ahead nearer the time? 

Here are some how-to’s for hibernacula and insect hotels, which are also fun to do with groups.

https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/actions/how-build-hibernaculum-amphibians-and-reptiles 

https://cdn.buglife.org.uk/2019/07/Build-a-bug-hotel.pdf  

Please let me know if I’ve missed anything. I hope you have a lovely weekend. 

All the best, 

Sophie Brown 

Assistant Ranger

Central Downs Team

South Downs National Park Authority 

Tel:  01243 811533 I  07917602380
Central Downs Office, Weald & Downland Museum, Singleton, Chichester, West Sussex, PO18 0EU

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