Bryn Arw Common Pilot Plant | Stump up for Trees

Bryn Arw

Common Pilot Plant

The Pilot Plant

Bryn Arw is a low hill on the eastern edge of the Black Mountains, 4km north of Abergavenny, within the Brecon Beacons National Park. In 2017, Keith Powell, a seventh generation Black Mountains farmer and a founder of Stump Up For Trees, initiated a project to plant circa 130,000 native broadleaf trees on a 64-hectare section of deep bracken, part of the common land that covers the summit and flanks of Bryn Arw.

This pioneering project is the first, significant tree plant on common land in Wales.

Working closely with Coed Cymru and Coed Cadw-The Woodland Trust in Wales, the Bryn Arw Commoners Association secured the consent of the landowners, the graziers and all the relevant consultees. Permission to erect a fence on the common for 12 years was granted by the Welsh Planning Inspectorate on 10/5/19.

The Welsh Government, via the Glastir Woodland Creation scheme, have agreed to fund this project. The funding partly covers ground preparation and the plant itself, plus 12 years of aftercare for the trees, to ensure the highest rates of survivability.
Through entering a partnership agreement with Coed Cadw, the project received expert advice on the plant design, particularly relating to the mix of broadleaf species and how best to protect the existing trees on the common.
Coed Cadw also agreed to fund and help carry out surveys, to provide biodiversity baseline data for the whole of Bryn Arw Common. Botanical data surveys were conducted in 2019-20; bird and Lepidoptera surveys are being carried out over summer 2021. Data will be collected periodically, going forward, hopefully with the involvement of our volunteers.
The final chunk of funding, to cover the necessary ground preparations and ongoing maintenance until the trees are established, which entails extensive bracken control, has been raised through the sale of carbon credits via Forest Carbon. The carbon that will be sequestered on Bryn Arw was purchased by Utility Warehouse, who are heavily engaged in the project and are now major supporters of Stump Up For Trees going forward.
The trees for the plant came from Maelor. This nursery in Shropshire is part of the ‘UK and Ireland Sourced and Grown’ (UKISG) scheme. The trees are all local seed provenance.

Ground preparations were carried out over summer 2020. Planting began in December 2020. In exceptional circumstances due to coronavirus restrictions and against the odds, the plant was completed in March 2021.

Bryn Arw and Stump Up For Trees

We have been able to use the Bryn Arw project as a pilot for Stump Up For Trees in many ways:

to understand the logistical issues around planting trees at scale.
to trial our tree planting and tree maintenance programmes with volunteers.
to explore how best to engage groups of school students on site visits.
in advancing our knowledge of bracken control during tree establishment.
and in experimenting with planting trees without using any plastic tree guards

Media

Because this is the first tree plant on common land in Wales, there has been significant media attention:

When we cut the letters in the bracken in summer 2020, BBC Wales came to film
Rob did a podcast with Countryfile about Bryn Arw, and tree planting on the Welsh uplands
Tree planting on Bryn Arw featured on Escape to the Farm with Kate Humble (from 1.45-6.20 minutes)
Lee Waters, MS, Deputy Minister for Climate Change visited Bryn Arw to speak to Keith and Kate, before announcing his ‘call to arms' about significantly increasing tree planting in Wales over the next decade.

Botanical Survey

With the assistance of Coed Cadw-The Woodland Trust in wales, a botanical survey was carried out on Bryn Arw. Transects were laid in Spring 2020, before ground preparations for planting on the common began. In this video, Alison Wheeler, an ecologist with over 30 years of field experience, outlines how the survey works.

With this baseline data, we will continue to record the flora on Bryn Arw annually.

Ongoing Ecological Surveys

In the spring and summer of 2022, professional ecologists returned to Bryn Arw to train our volunteers in how to conduct bird, butterfly and flora surveys. We now have over 30 volunteers with the skills to record the changes to the biodiversity that are taking place inside and outside the plant site on Bryn Arw, over the years, and even decades, to come.

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