There has been some exciting activity at the Reserve this year, including several well attended hedge planting sessions with local volunteers as well as the ongoing ‘Balsam Bashes’ during the summer and recording of the birds using the Reserve.

In the meantime the Trust is working hard to raise funds to continue the management of the site into the future. This funding is unlikely to be available until the new year at which time we hope this will provide more staff ‘on the ground’ to work with volunteers and contractors to improve the wildlife habitats, access and interpretation material on the Reserve.

Potential funding steams include;

• The National Heritage Lottery Fund – Application submitted in November and decision on January/February (for staff, interpretation, restoration and monitoring)
• Welsh Water  - match funding for the above Lottery application
• Capital Countryside Stewardship – Application for reserve access, livestock fencing and hedge management
• Biodiversity Net Gain – this is a potentially very useful form of funding which will be shared with the Church Commissioners as per the terms of our lease.

After signing the lease with the Church Commissioners in May 2023, work began on reviewing the management plan and over the following few months a management plan was agreed by Herefordshire Wildlife Trust, the steering group of Friends of Bartonsham Meadows, and has been shared and discussed with the Church Commissioners.  The plan includes several key management objectives, the following is a brief summary, for more detail and locations, see the Draft Management Plan.

Floodplain Meadow Restoration

One of the primary objectives is the restoration of around 18ha (just over half the area of the nature reserve) of Floodplain Meadow with the eventual aim of restoring traditional hay cutting and grazing.

Experts from the Floodplain Meadows Partnership visited Bartonsham in October to advise on future management. They recommended that we remove the standing vegetation once or twice a year for two or three years between May and July. This process will reduce the dominance of the more vigorous plants like docks and thistles and will reduce soil fertility, particularly phosphates to a level where we can start to introduce the wild flowers and grasses which would once have grown at Bartonsham Meadows.

The first step in this process was to remove around three years growth of arable weeds from 18ha of the Reserve and to transport this off site to an Anaerobic Digester or composting facility. The cut material was first stored in large plastic bags which turned the material into a form of silage. This process retains much of the stored energy in the cut material and makes it more useable and valuable energy source for the AD facility, thus reducing the cost of removing it. In future we hope that the material can be taken directly to the AD facility without the need to turn it into silage. In the longer term material will be removed as hay with cattle or sheep grazing the re-growth in late summer.

Managed Natural Regeneration

Another main objective of the Reserve management plan is the establishment of around 17ha (just under half the area of the reserve) Managed Natural Regeneration.

This is more or less all about letting nature do its own thing! 

As anyone who has walked the meadows during the summer will have noticed, the mixture of docks, thistles and nettles which regenerated naturally in the disturbed soils left by the farming operations after the floods of 2019, provided a habitat for an amazing variety of birds and insects as well as a surprising number of other plants. The structure of the habitat formed by the tall, robust plants like docks, hogweed, teasel and tansy, provides important habitat diversity for the reserve as a whole and while this area may look a little untidy to some eyes at the moment, it will change over time and provide an interesting contrast to the more intensively managed areas of floodplain meadow.  We aim to have a few grazing animals on this area in order to create a ‘mosaic’ of grass and scrub which will develop over time to create a rich habitat for a great variety of plants and animals.

There has been some concern about seeds from thistles causing problems in the areas of meadow restoration, this is something we will need to keep an eye on but because most of the meadows now have an establishes grass sward, giving fewer opportunities for seeds to establish themselves, we hope this will become less of a problem, especially as the dominance of thistle in the natural regeneration areas reduces over time.

Monitoring and Recording

We hope to involve groups of local volunteers and potentially students from nearby Colleges and Universities in recording and monitoring the development of the habitats on the reserve as time goes on. We’ll share the results on the website and via newsletters to people who have expressed an interest.

Other important aspects of managing the Reserve include;

• hedge management – newly planted hedge and existing hedges
• pond restoration – of the two ‘ghost ponds’ shown on historic maps and in some aerial photos.
• interpretation – to explain about the wildlife and management of the reserve