Knaresborough Forest Park: Thousands of Yorkshire locals rally to buy 60 acres of historic land in Knaresborough to protect it from developers and preserve its natural beauty and heritage
The Knaresborough Forest Park (KFP) is a project founded in late 2022 when Yorkshire locals decided to buy 60 acres of land of what was formerly the historic Knaresborough Forest.
Around 2,000 pledges were made with a grant of £410,000 from the George Moore Foundation and a loan from an environmental charitable fund called We Have the Power.
The project is part of a wider proposal Long Lands Common (LLC) which was established in 2020 by members who purchased the initial 30 acres of greenbelt farmland between Harrogate and Knaresborough.
The KFP land is made up of nine fields which will be utilised to create community building activities.
George Eglese, member of the LLC board and creative director of KFP, and Geoff Freeston, the site lead for KFP explained the project.
Around 2,000 pledges were made with a grant of £410,000 from the George Moore Foundation and a loan from an environmental charitable fund called We Have the Power.
The project is part of a wider proposal Long Lands Common (LLC) which was established in 2020 by members who purchased the initial 30 acres of greenbelt farmland between Harrogate and Knaresborough.
The KFP land is made up of nine fields which will be utilised to create community building activities.
George Eglese, member of the LLC board and creative director of KFP, and Geoff Freeston, the site lead for KFP explained the project.
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00:00So Knaresboroughs Park is about, similarly to Longlands Common, is about
00:07protecting nature, enhancing nature, opening up the community, providing that
00:13space for people to disconnect, to sort of reconnect with the natural
00:18environment, to learn about our local, you know, natural habitats and just really
00:27I suppose, yeah, just provide that, you know, restoring the kind of commons which I
00:35feel is quite a big part of this, as this sort of formed part of the
00:40ancient Royal Knaresborough Forest which was enclosed in the 1780s, 1770s, so we're
00:48actually, there's an opportunity now where we're buying back this land from
00:52private individuals into common ownership, into community ownership, so
00:57we've got over 3,000 shareholders in the community, so it's a big project, it's a
01:02big site, big ambition, but the kind of, it's so, it's so amazing how much the
01:15community want this kind of stuff to happen and the support we've had both in
01:20people wanting to volunteer and to get involved financially, I think it really
01:25shows that people are starting to think differently about the needs and how they
01:30want to live and their lifestyle and that we do need more open and access
01:34wild spaces where people can just get lost and explore and just be.
01:40I think we were very blessed in Harrogate because we had a lot of green
01:44spaces anyway, but I don't think we can ever have enough and certainly this sort
01:50of prime, sort of green belt space between both Harrogate and Knaresborough
01:54which, you know, potentially is under threat from development and we're
01:58securing that to ensure that there is that green lung, that green space between
02:02the two towns, a thriving place for the community, you know, abundant with nature
02:08and also illustrate the heritage and the history of the area, the landscape and
02:13tell that story through, you know, the project and what we're doing. I think
02:18it's an amazing project as well because it's an opportunity for the community to
02:24actually own it and be a part of it, you know, we're constituted as a community
02:30benefit society, so as I say we have over 3,000 shareholders who are, you know,
02:35stakeholders, shareholders in the company that owns the land, so there's a really
02:39innovative way of securing swathes of green space and doing something positive
02:44that's in the interest of the community and not private individuals. So we've
02:48just launched our crowdfunder now because we need to raise £300,000
02:53to basically seal the deal. We were very grateful to receive a £400,000
02:59grant from a local foundation, the George Moore Foundation, who really kick-started the project for us and we had a
03:07great swathe of pledges and support from the community after that and then
03:11due to time constraints we had to seek a bridging loan from a philanthropic
03:16lender, so Julia Davies from We Have The Power has enabled us to actually put in
03:22a bid and secure the land and now we need to pay her loan off. So our crowdfund
03:26has been launched, we need to raise £300,000, within a week we're already on
03:31£60,000, so we really need as much of the community to come together to really
03:36ensure that we can protect all this land, as much land as possible, to protect the
03:41greenbelt, create more wild spaces for people and nature.
03:46You'll see this from in here. This is the second of the hay meadow fields.
03:51This one is going to be used for a food forest. I don't know whether you know about the food forest concept.
03:57It's a permaculture concept where you plant things in association on different levels.
04:02So you have the big tall fruiting trees and underneath that you have some
04:06intermediate trees like fruit bushes and nut bushes. Underneath that you have
04:11smaller plants and then you have the ground cover plants. It's all planting things in
04:15association because they do much better in association than what they do
04:19individually with bare earth around them.
04:23This has been a dream of the group at Longlands Common for a long time,
04:28to have a food field in addition to their wildlife reserve.
04:32On here are the wild plums.
04:37It's a bullus. It's somewhere between a damson and a slow, I suppose, or a wild plum.
04:46There's a lot of these around here. Can you see?
04:49There's a few damsons around there.
04:52I think part of the concept of the food forest is it's going to encourage foraging,
04:57but they'll plant stuff to be foraged, so it's not kind of threatening nature at all.
05:02It's that kind of concept where you can have some kind of wild plants for your salad.
05:07Also with that we might do the tea garden,
05:10where we can grow all the plants we can use for making tea,
05:13all the different herbs to make kind of interesting teas,
05:16which we can have a brew up as we're working.
05:19And maybe even a dye garden, where you can have dye plants to grow there.
05:24A little corner we can have a patch of wheat or a patch of flax.
05:28So kids, it's not just kids really, is it?
05:31It's other people as well who have lost that connection with where food comes from.
05:37They've lost that connection with the natural world.
05:39So this is a real opportunity to kind of rebuild that connection really.
05:44It's also tremendously good for our well-being to be working outside in the green environment.
05:49We always knew it was good for us, but now it's been proven.
05:53Scientifically, it is good for us to work outside with living things.
05:58And that's such an opportunity really,
06:01to do that alongside all our other stuff of rebuilding biodiversity
06:08and all the other things that we can do here.