‘Britain’s Yellowstone’: restoration project aims to take the greed out of land acquisition

The vast glacial bowl of 7,500-acre Emblehope Moor has been bought for £8.5m by Restore. Photograph: Mark Pinder/The Guardian View image in fullscreen The vast glacial bowl of 7,500-acre Emblehope Moor has been bought for £8.5m by Restore. Photograph: Mark Pinder/The Guardian ‘Britain’s Yellowstone’: restoration project aims to take the greed out of land acquisition Investors in Emblehope Moor will get their financial returns – and then it will be given to community or charity owners It is difficult to find the most remote place in England. There is no public transport, no roads and no sign of any human habitation. Online route finders mistakenly direct cars up a grassy track. But miles along gravel forest roads in the far north of Northumberland is the largest contiguous rewilding site under single ownership in the country. The vast glacial bowl of 7,500-acre Emblehope Moor has been bought for £8.5m by Restore, a nature restoration company that works with landowners across Britain. The aim is to bring golden eagles, curlews, black grouse and beavers back to the moor which in former guises was a traditional grouse shooting and sheep farming estate and a dog-training ground. But the restoration project, which is still seeking to raise £4m to fund its 20-year scheme, also has a unique proposition: after delivering new biodiversity and abundance alongside financial returns for investors and repaying the crucial £4.5m Triodos Bank loan that enabled the purchase, it will hand over the site to local community or charitable ownership. View image in fullscreen Restore’s first tasks will be to return water to desiccated peat moorland and remove swaths of non-native sitka spruce. Photograph: Mark Pinder/The Guardian“We want to prove that the bank is paid back, investors get their two-times return but we don’t need to become the next for ever laird,” said Benedict Macdonald, an environmental writer and the founder and director of Restore. “We’re keen to leave a well-funded community project for the future. It’s not an aggressive land-holding model; it’s both a capitalist and community model and I want it to become the national model for the uplands – we’ve got to take the greed out of it for it to work.” The environmentalist Ben Goldsmith hails the burgeoning mosaic of increasingly wild estates in Northumberland as Britain’s Yellowstone. Close to Emblehope in the north of Northumberland is Rothbury, the largest estate to come on the market for 30 years, which the Wildlife Trusts are seeking to buy with an unprecedented £30m fundraising appeal that is nearing its target.