A Devon Wildlife Trust Nature Reserve
Lose yourself in a wide open landscape amid one of the rarest habitats in the world. A sense of space and timelessness greets the visitor stepping out on to the largest surviving area of culm grassland in Devon.
Culm grassland is a rare habitat comprising distinctive wetland plants, sustained by acidic clay soils, light grazing, and high rainfall. This combination of environmental conditions with low intensity land management, largely unchanged since prehistoric times, maintains the site's wildlife richness.
Unbroken views, as far as the edges of Dartmoor and Exmoor, reach across a diverse array of wet pastures, heaths, bogs and mires, scrub and fringes of woodland. This may lend an impression of vast ancient emptiness, but in the last century over 90% of culm grassland has been lost.
Much of what remains is to be found fragmented across north Devon. Rackenford and Knowstone moor is of crucial value as the most extensive remnant still in existence today. Devon Wildlife Trust works to protect, re-create and link together isolated culm grassland sites through the Working Wetlands and North Devon Nature Improvement Area projects.
https://www.devonwildlifetrust.org/nature-reserves/rackenford-and-knowstone-moors
Photo: Grant Sherman 10th April 2022
