Wetland creation – Needingworth quarry, Cambridgeshire

The story of this visionary project begins in the late 1980s. With reserves running out at three existing sites in the St Ives area, Heidelberg Materials, then known as ARC, acquired an interest in Over Fen, a large parcel of gravel-rich land adjacent to the village – parts of which had belonged to other mineral companies.

Securing planning permission wasn’t easy.  It took four years and the final consent included over 100 conditions, including the requirement for a substantial financial contribution towards construction of the Needingworth bypass.

By the mid 1990s production had begun and in 1996 the then Prime Minister John Major formally opened the quarry, describing it as one of the most modern sand and gravel operations in Europe.

Cambridgeshire County Council had initially approved a scheme to return the land to a mixture of agriculture, leisure and conservation. However, as part of the planning consent and through lobbying by various conservation bodies including English Nature, RSPB, The Wildlife Trust, the Countryside Commission and Environment Agency, Heidelberg Materials was asked to prepare a feasibility study to look at restoring the site to a wetland nature reserve.

One of those bodies – and undoubtedly the most enthusiastic - was the RSPB, who worked with Heidelberg Materials’s in-house experts to design a substantial nature reserve extending to 700 hectares. The proposals included access for the public with 32 km of footpaths and educational and interpretation activities.

Together the partners worked through the feasibility process, which included a comprehensive programme of public consultation to ensure community views were considered. The consultation included five public meetings, newsletters to 2,500 homes and resulted in more than 80 per cent of local people supporting the proposal.

This open and phased approach, aided by Cambridgeshire County Council in the important role of facilitator and regulator, was an integral element in the development of the scheme, which over the next 30 years will transform a working sand and gravel quarry into Britain’s biggest area of man-made wetland for the benefit of both wildlife and people.

In July 2007 a significant point in the development was reached when the first two phases totalling 44 hectares were handed over to the RSPB.

Over the coming years Heidelberg Materials will progressively donate further small parcels of land as sand and gravel extraction is completed. The RSPB will manage and develop this land for nature conservation. When the final area is handed over, the Ouse Fen Nature Reserve will be complete. The dream will have become reality.

Creating, maintaining and managing the site will take a considerable amount of time, effort, enthusiasm and money.

The Heidelberg Materials Environment Fund, the company’s landfill tax credit scheme, has been able to make a significant contribution to the costs in the shape of grants totalling more than £1 million, including the biggest single grant ever made by the fund. This will ensure the project has a stable base on which to build for the future.

In 2007 the quarry produced over one million tonnes of sand and gravel, providing the essential raw materials to build our schools, hospitals, factories, roads and homes. At the same time the staff were successfully tackling the technical challenges presented by creating new habitat from largely low-grade farmland.

Heidelberg Materials UK CEO Patrick O’Shea said: “This project shows that we can make a very positive contribution to the UK’s landscape, its wildlife, its habitats and its biodiversity.

“We can all take pride in what has been achieved at Needingworth. A vital industry – in this case quarrying – working hand in hand with a leading conservation organisation, planners, regulators and NGOs to create and preserve vital new habitat.

“The project demonstrates the enormous benefits that can be derived from working together, and the potential that responsible mineral extraction can bring, both to the environment and to biodiversity.”

A wetland past

The creation of new wetlands has been identified as a national priority in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan, endorsed by government. They are needed to safeguard threatened birds such as the bittern, reduced to 13 booming males in the UK in 1998, and to provide new habitat to off-set projected future loses of internationally important coastal wetlands through coastal erosion.

The Fens is a unique and special area. It owes it existence to its origins as the nation's largest lowland wetland with impassable swamps, rich grazing and abundant fish and other wildlife. The links to this wetland past are strong and remain in the rich dark soils, the pattern of settlement, and in the wildness of the last remaining wetland fragments. Wetlands are an increasingly scarce resource throughout the world. Within the Fens only a few large sites escaped drainage: Wicken and Woodwalton Fens are now recognised as internationally important wildlife habitats as Special Areas of Conservation (SAC).

The large washlands of the Ouse and Nene rivers, which attract internationally important numbers of wildfowl species including Bewick's swan and widgeon, are designated under the RAMSAR convention. Smaller fragments, containing typical fenland wildlife, such as reed buntings and dragonflies, remain in every ditch and drain with reeds being the living sign of wetland past.

A wetland future

New wetlands can make a major contribution towards achieving UK biodiversity targets through securing the future of important wildlife habitats and species.

East Anglia is of outstanding importance because it contains a significant proportion of key wetland habitats that support some of our most threatened species. These include reedbeds (50 per cent of the UK resource); swamp fen remnants such as Wicken and Woodwalton Fens (80 per cent), and seasonally flooded grassland such as the Ouse Washes and Nene Washes (15 per cent).

The Fens are important because of:

• the internationally important populations of wintering ducks and swans that use the large washlands and surrounding farmlands;
• the internationally important remnants of former swamp fens, which support a number of plants and invertebrates found nowhere else in the UK;
• the nationally important populations of breeding waders concentrated on the Ouse and Nene Washes in spring and summer;
• the extensive network of farm ditches and larger drains, which provide refuges for relict fen plans and invertebrates, and support characteristic birds including reed warblers;
• the potential to create new wetland.

Creating new habitats

The UK Biodiversity steering group report, adopted by government in 1996, identifies those species and habitats of highest priority for conservation action in the UK. The Fens supports, or has the potential to support, a number of priority species including otter, water vole, bittern, fen violet and swallowtail butterfly.

Since 1600, some 97 per cent of the original wetlands have been lost and species have been confined to smaller and smaller sites. Some, such as bittern and the spectacular swallowtail and large copper butterflies, have disappeared altogether as fenland breeding species. The loss of habitats places more species at risk and increases the need for expensive specialist management. More habitat is needed to sustain these populations for which the Fens is so important.

External factors, such as the threat of accelerated rates of coastal erosion on the East Anglian coast also have implications for the Fens. Anticipated sea level rise and increased storminess are likely to lead to accelerated losses of freshwater wetlands of national and international importance on the East Anglian coast.

Creating new habitat suitable for important species is a technical challenge. Pioneering habitats such as reedbeds and seasonally flooded grassland are relatively easy to create and can quite rapidly support key wetland species such as wildfowl. The creation peat based fen is a far greater challenge as this requires conditions where new peat can form over many centuries.

Restoring fens from low level mineral workings may provide the only real opportunity for long-term wetland creation.