THE final piece of the funding jigsaw needed to save an important feature of the Yorkshire Dales has fallen into place.

A grant of £59,800 from the Heritage Lottery Fund means the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust has raised more than £200,000 in the last six months to buy Ashes Pasture in Ribblesdale.

The pasture is regarded as an important upland hay meadow site sand only a handful of such wildlife-rich sites remain in the Dales and the trust believes saving the patch was of “uppermost” importance.

Regional manager Jono Leadley said:“We have been bowled over by the response by members of Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and the wider public to our fundraising campaign”

Ashes Pasture is close to the Ribblehead Viaduct on the Settle to Carlisle railway line and is a window back in time, offering a glimpse of the wildlife which would have once thrived throughout the Dales landscape.

The funding will enable the trust to increase its current small nature reserve of eight hectares to twenty hectares, including the remaining section of a Site of Special Scientific Interest and surrounding land.

It will give the trust the chance to enhance the much larger site for wildlife and to improve public access to this site.

Ashes Pasture is renowned among naturalists for its wild flowers, including several species of orchids such as the exquisite greater butterfly orchid and very rare small white orchid.

Improvements to a traditional stone barn should encourage the barn owls and kestrels that use the site to stay and breed, while better meadow management should help ground-nesting birds such as curlew.

“Purchasing the land surrounding the current nature reserve will give the wildlife that calls Ashes Pasture a home a much brighter future,” added Mr Leadley.

“Small, isolated sites are very vulnerable to external pressures and once wildlife is lost there can be no way that species can return.”

“Bigger sites with better conservation management are more robust and better able to withstand the impacts of bad weather, unintentional damage and so on,”