The Weald Moors form a highly sensitive peat landscape characterised by rush-filled drainage dykes, damp pasture land and slow-flowing rivers and streams, known locally as ‘strines’. This is some of the Shropshire’s lowest and wettest ground, where a high water table has shaped a unique but vulnerable wetland inheritance. The thick peat deposits that provide the area with so much of its character were laid down at the end of the last Ice Age, around twenty thousand years ago, and once provided the foundation for a vast, slow-moving watery fen that covered some seventy square kilometres. That this is no longer the case owes much to a dense network of Nineteenth Century drainage ditches that sped water away from the area and resulted in the patchwork of pasture and crop fields we see today.

Wetlands are the most productive landscapes on Earth, with a wide range of plants, animals and insects you won’t find anywhere else. So, while the forensically drained modern day Weald Moors landscape may be a shadow of its former self, this ‘big area’ still has wilderness at its beating heart — and an array of flora and fauna that depend on its damp soils for their survival. The east Shropshire moorlands are a regional strong hold for a number of increasingly rare species and our safari, although by no means exhaustive, will aim to show just some of the birds, small mammals, plants, insects and aquatic life to be found in this characterful place (as well as the major habitat features that support them).