DiscoverWoodland Walks - The Woodland Trust Podcast9. Buckland Wood, Devon: reviving a rare rainforest
9. Buckland Wood, Devon: reviving a rare rainforest

9. Buckland Wood, Devon: reviving a rare rainforest

Update: 2025-04-30
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Buckland Wood is no ordinary wood. This is magical temperate rainforest, a rare habitat not just in the UK but in the world. Cloaked in lush lichens and mosses, dotted with stone walls and bridges and with a beautiful river rambling through, it already looks and feels like a special place. But the Trust has big plans for its future. Join us to explore with rainforest guru Sam, who tells us about the bid to restore this globally important site and its huge potential to connect people with nature, store carbon and boost biodiversity. Hear why temperate rainforests are so special, along with pine marten reintroductions, backpacks on beetles and much more!

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Transcript

You are listening to Woodland Walks, a podcast for the Woodland Trust presented by Adam Shaw. We protect and plant trees for people to enjoy, to fight climate change and to help wildlife thrive. 

Adam: For today's woodland walk, we are heading into the rainforest, but I am not going very far. Well, I'm going quite far, but not to the Amazon, or South America. I'm going to to the temperate rainforest, which isn't as well known, but is actually even rarer than the tropical rainforest. It's also known as Atlantic or Celtic rainforest. And as I said, exceptionally rare. You do find it on the West Coast of Scotland, North and West Wales, Devon, Cornwall, Cumbria, parts of Northern Ireland, which sounds like a long list, but it really isn't. And what's wonderful actually is that Britain is really the place in the world to find these things. We have a very high proportion of the global area of temperate rainforest. I'm heading to Devon to see some temperate rainforests. Anyway, enough from me. Let's go talk to an expert about Devons temperate and exciting rainforest. 

Sam: So I'm Sam Manning. I'm the project officer for the Woodland Trust Rainforest Recovery Project. We are here in Buckland Wood, which is a new Woodland Trust acquisition on Dartmoor in the Dart Valley. 

Adam: Fantastic. And it's it's super new because the place we came down didn't seem to have a sign on it or anything. So when did the Trust acquire this? 

Sam: So we've literally just acquired this this month and it's an extension really of two other sites that we own in the Dart Valley, Ausewell Wood, which we bought about five years ago and Grey Park Wood, which we’ve owned for a couple of decades. 

Adam: Right. And and what are we gonna do? Where are you taking me <span class="NormalT

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9. Buckland Wood, Devon: reviving a rare rainforest

9. Buckland Wood, Devon: reviving a rare rainforest

The Woodland Trust