Greendale Wood - Grindleton
Site Description
The site was purchased in two stages. The first section was acquired by the Woodland Trust in May 2000. This occurred after a successful fundraising campaign, which was well supported and funded by local organisations and people, particularly the Lancashire Environmental Fund and Castle Cement. The wood was created as part of the Trust’s ‘Woods On Your Doorstep’ project, funded partly by the Millennium Commission to create 200 new woods throughout England & Wales to celebrate the millennium and provide new accessible woods for communities, with further funding from the Forestry Commission to aid the planting and maintenance. The second section was gifted to the Woodland Trust in April 2006.
In April 2006 the trust were gifted an area of land which lies directly to the north of the original site. This extension is a total of 1.82 hectares and is currently pasture land. However one of the conditions of the gift it that the land must be leased under licence to a grazier for the next three years. Therefore there will be no public access onto this land and it will continue to be grazed until April 2009. After this time the trust plans to plant the site with native broadleaf trees.
The young woodland is 4.8 hectares (11.86 acres) in size and was planted on 2 pasture fields that slope south east and south west on either side of a small valley, with the Grindleton Brook flowing southwards through the middle. It is on the western edge of the village of Grindleton which is in a rural part of the Ribble Valley, although close to the busy town of Clitheroe. There are pasture fields immediately to the west and part of both the northern and southern boundaries. A road, houses and gardens are adjacent to the remaining north, south and the entire eastern boundary. The wood almost entirely surrounds the old Greendale Mill, which now has limited use, and is virtually in the centre of the site.
The wood can be accessed from several points. The easiest entrances to find are 2 informal access points from Buck Street to the south, which is a small road leading off the main road (Grindleton Brow and Sawley Road) through Grindleton, to the side of the Duke of York Hotel. Other well-used access points also lead from the village with two public footpaths leading from Main Street into the wood. On site there are the public footpaths and a network of permissive paths, which create several circular routes. These paths lead across to access points in the southern corner, and continue over adjacent fields. Management access is from 2 points on Buck Street. At the highest point on site there are good views southwards towards Pendle Hill. A couple of seats provide resting points, one near the village, one at the high point. Parking is available on nearby local roads but may be limited. The wood is used mainly by local people who arrive on foot, for quiet informal recreation.
Local people have been very involved with the acquisition, design, creation and naming of the wood. Greendale is a local name, with the mill in the middle being Greendale Mill. Damson trees, grown from suckers and cuttings of local trees, (for which the area is well-known) were planted alongside the path leading from Buck Street by the Duke of York Hotel as a Millennium feature. In December 2000, two tree planting days were organised, one with local school children and the other with local people and the army cadets.
Detailed history of the site is not known, but a map of 1848 shows the layout of the fields and public footpaths as at acquisition, with stepping stones over the brook for the northern path. The site of Greendale Mill appears partly to be a wooded bank.
The fields on which the wood was planted contain common grasses and flowering plants, mainly rye grass with creeping buttercup, daisy, grass, dandelion, lesser celandine, creeping thistle, nettle, campion, and appear to be fertilised. On the banks and alongside the old hedgerows (particularly the northern one) are violets, wild strawberry, sedge, ivy, cuckoo pint, primroses, dog’s mercury, cuckoo flower, Juncus, brooklime, and ribwort plantain. The gully to the north has bluebells. The old hedgerows surrounding and within the site consist of hawthorn, holly, ash, blackthorn, hazel, elder and sycamore. The whole site was planted from December 2000 to January 2001 with a mix of 7,660 native trees and shrubs, of British provenance. These are: English oak, silver birch, ash, wild cherry, field maple, common alder, crab apple and with shrubs of rowan, guelder rose, hazel, hawthorn, blackthorn, goat willow, and bird cherry. A large number of locally grown damson trees were planted to line a path from Buck Street. Areas of open grassland have been left to form the paths and glades, and an open area also left on the steepest part of the bank, which held the greatest variety of wild flowers.
Prior to acquisition the fields were used for grazing, probably mainly sheep or cattle.
Boundaries to all the fields, road and neighbouring houses and gardens are well defined, mainly with fences and walls, and occasionally hedges as well. The boundary around the mill is not defined, but is slightly back from the wall of the mill itself.
