If you drew a straight(ish) line between Portishead, Nailsea and Weston-super-Mare, you’d be outlining the North Somerset Levels and Moors (NSLM). 

This squished triangle of landscape is an important, rare and difficult to describe habitat - coastal and floodplain grazing marsh. 

It is made up of many square miles of flat, low-lying ground, formed at the end of the last ice age (6000+ years ago) when impacts of tidal flow and glacial melt converged, dumping cake-like layers of tidal and mineral deposits over centuries as the waters gradually receded. 

The resulting landscape, chopped up by steep limestone ridges, and overlooked by the Mendip Hills in the distance, has historically been an important boggy wetland, with large areas forming as lowland peatland – an amazing habitat and important carbon sink (read my previous bog blog here). 

For centuries these wetlands have done a wonderful job of supporting fen vegetation (think reeds, rushes, sedges and tussocky grasses) and the associated wildlife including wetland birds like curlew, lapwing and snipe who use these areas to feed and breed. And let’s not overlook all the aquatic invertebrates who thrive in wetlands, providing an important food source for many species. 

As usual, we humans have intervened, making drastic changes to this landscape so it is suitable for us to inhabit and prosper. We learned how to drain it in order to farm it (thanks to the Dutch), and we built towns and villages around it as populations grew. 

If you took a bird’s-eye view of the NSLM (and indeed all the flat land up and down the Severn Estuary coastline) you’d notice the extensive ditch systems which now lace the landscape – draining all that water off the wetlands so we can farm it and live on it. We even created Internal Drainage Boards to oversee this function. 

Over the last two decades the Trust has been working in this region to understand how human impacts have changed this landscape, and how it links to the decline in nature we can all see. 

We’ve talked to farmers about their ditches and farming practices, communities about the declining water quality, and individuals about their concerns about catastrophic regional flood risk. With farming (and farming policy changes), cost of living and planning and development pressures, these conversations have often been tough, and they haven’t always yielded positive change. 

Since April 2024 the Trust has been working on the Somerset Moor Futures project building engagement with landowners, farmers, communities and key stakeholders across the NSLM. We’ve engaged with many landowners and created two Moor Associations (similar to farm clusters), and we’re collaborating at a bigger scale than ever before.

Bringing together Moor Associations and expertise from statutory agencies, farming advisors and flood risk managers, we’re building a bold, ambitious landscape-scale plan to address the urgent challenges we’ve identified for this area. And because we are doing this by working alongside the landowners and farmers, giving them current, relevant information and knowledge, we’re supporting them to make the best decisions for their futures too. 

Working in this collaborative way we can make the landscape more resilient to the impacts of climate change (such as drought, flooding, heat stress). This will hugely benefit the communities who live and work here, as they will have to adapt to these impacts and pressures too. 

But the icing on the project cake is that by adapting the landscape, we will protect these wonderful wetlands and give nature a chance to thrive across the North Somerset Levels and Moors once again.