Friday, 31 July 2020

Where will they put the West Midlands National Park?

In the news today: "Plans for West Midlands National Park move forward".

So where exactly would they put it, if it was to be something real and big. Not just a patchwork PR exercise that aimed to provoke no NIMBY-ism from voters? If it's indeed to be big and green, then I guess it would have to be near Birmingham, for political reasons. And be positioned so it at least has a chance of an eventual genuine connection with the National Forest, in perhaps 50 years.

Looking at the map, I'd then guess that a starting point would be adding 'wild-belt' hedged strips and that try to link up the natural areas between Sutton Park and Cannock Chase. Such that after 20 years a squirrel could (just about) leap from tree-to-tree from Sutton Coldfield up to Stafford.

Such wide thick-hedged wildife strips would be very-low cost, if they were for nature only, and were not hijacked by local councils to be public paths used by cyclists, dog-walkers, etc. All one would need would be to buy the strips of relatively low-value land, then add some stakes and wire and hedge it either side of the strip. The strip would be wide enough to be easily mown for wild-flower meadow, and would go more or less in a bee-line. After a decade, get in some lads with hedge-laying tools. Maybe also make some ponds at the connector-points, and at a distance around those plant clumps of what will eventually become large mature trees. All just for nature, no public access to the connector strips, only to what they're connecting.

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