WILDFLOWER-FILLED FUTURE FOR FORMER COLLIERY SITE

Staffs landfill restoration scheme takes root

The latest stage in a £1.5 million plan to return a former Staffordshire landfill site back to nature has got underway.

The 10-acre Wyrley Grove site at Gorsey Lane, Pelsall, which Hampshire-based waste management company Cleansing Service Group (CSG) used as a landfill for industrial and commercial waste for 13 years, was declared full last year and closed.

Since then, the site has been capped with a plastic membrane, which has been welded to a bottom liner installed before waste disposal began, to form a huge leakproof plastic ‘envelope’. The area has now been covered with 200,000 tonnes of sub and topsoil which has coated the landfill to a depth of one metre.

Now the site, once the washing pit for Wyrley Grove Colliery which closed in 1952, is being planted to turn it into a wildlife haven and pasture for grazing sheep.

Work has just begun on seeding the site with a mixture of grasses and many of Britain’s traditional wildflowers, such as musk mallow, red and white campions, vetch, birdsfoot trefoil, ox-eye daisy, yellow flag iris, meadowsweet and ragged robin.

By next summer, some 25 wildflower species should be established across the newly-landscaped site which lies alongside the SSI-designated Cannock Extension Canal.

And by late autumn of next year, more than 3,500 trees will have been planted there, including hazel, dogrose, rowan, birch, willow, alder and oak. More than 200 metres of new native hedgerow will also be established across the site.

The scheme will also include a large, newly-created pond and marshy area planted with a mixture of aquatic plants chosen to encourage wildife to Wyrley Grove, and a wildlife corridor to help species migrate across the site.

CSG has commissioned Forestry Consultant Richard Sochacki, who specialises in woodland establishment, to plan and manage the greening of Wyrley Grove, including drawing up a five-year aftercare and maintenance scheme.

CSG managing director Paul Quigley said: “The vision we had for Wyrley Grove once it had been closed to landfill is now becoming a reality. Now that planting is underway we should soon see this long-established brownfield site transformed into a green and pleasant area supporting a thriving biodiversity.”