Lodge Castle is a 26-acre site near the settlement of Distington, Cumbria. Despite the name, the site doesn’t have a castle and is named after the long-since abandoned, and now derelict, farm.
Squeezed between a crematorium, an ex-tip, and a closed open-cast mine the site doesn’t sound as though it has much potential for nature, but nature can thrive in the least expected places. When the tip and mine were operational things would have been much less attractive to anyone, let alone to wildlife. However, since the closure of the tip and the mine the surrounding areas have become ‘wilder’ offering a refuge for nature.
Our site is mostly water-logged, very poor pasture (the worst we’ve acquired to date) dominated by dense rushes (Juncus effusus) that even the local hardy Herdwick sheep don’t touch.
With very generous help from Raise: Cumbria Community Forest via the Trees for Climate programme (funded by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs through the Nature for Climate Fund), we acquired this site (our fourth acquisition) in November 2024 and plan to have the majority of the project complete by the end of the 2025 planting season.
The plans are to plant a mixture of deciduous and non-deciduous tree and scrub species using the same cluster planting method as our other sites. This will see 70,000 new trees planted in random blocks across the site varying as the ground dictates.
Unlike our other sites Castle Lodge will also get 6 new ponds. Each will be a minimum of 200m2 and distributed across the site to increase the possibility of making this a haven for newts and many other aquatic wildlife that are lacking in our countryside.
