Country & Coast: Wildlife legacy of swingeing railway closures

OFTEN THE richest habitats for wildlife were not created by the seismic forces of nature but by the comparatively feeble hands of humans, and one of the best is our disused railway lines.
Viaducts provide birds with high-rise nesting sites in spring. Picture: Tony Johnson.Viaducts provide birds with high-rise nesting sites in spring. Picture: Tony Johnson.
Viaducts provide birds with high-rise nesting sites in spring. Picture: Tony Johnson.

Many of them, like the delightful cinder track between Robin Hood’s Bay and Whitby, last resounded to the chugging of trains back in 1965, victims of the notorious Beeching Report which closed several thousand miles of track and almost a third of Britain’s rural railway stations.

In the half century since then nature has colonised abandoned railway cuttings that were blasted through bare rock by Victorian dynamite, and embankments constructed by navvies. Now the old lines often resemble miniature dales, and many have become linear wildlife sanctuaries.

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Tracks which once would have been scrupulously maintained by the railway companies to ensure lines were kept free of fallen trees are overgrown with everything up to and including mature oaks, silver birches and sycamore. Viaducts have crumbled away to provide birds with high-rise nesting sites in spring, as in Lobb Wood at Bolton Abbey where one which supported the Ilkley-Skipton line has given homes to starlings and jackdaws, swallows and blue tits.

But it’s in late summer and autumn that disused lines are seen at their best. Embankments are heaped with fruit-bearing bushes like blackberry, hawthorn, elder, rowan, spindle and dog rose. Lower down, often across the old track bed itself, seeds are released from shrubs like hogweed, thistles, teasel and knapweed.

These are already bringing flocks of bullfinches and goldfinches to the cinder track near Whitby, and it was heartening to see a good number of greenfinches squabbling over crab apples last weekend. Greenfinches have suffered a dramatic decline in the past decade because of an outbreak of trichomonosis, a parasite-induced disease which prevents the birds from feeding properly.

When all the berries are ripe there will be constant activity by blackbirds, song and mistle thrushes, joined in October by redwings and fieldfares from Scandinavia, allowing them to build up vital reserves of body fat for the winter.

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At the top of the food chain here are sparrowhawks, swooping along the courses of the lines like stealth bombers, pouncing on the slowest birds to seek cover, and kestrels hovering on the lookout for small mammals in the rich undergrowth. Badgers often excavate the embankments for their setts, and roe deer find the old tracks good for furtive cross country movement.

Some people would love the 20-mile line that once linked Scarborough with Whitby to be restored for trains. After all, in Scotland the old Waverley Route from Edinburgh to the Scottish borders, another Beeching victim, is finally due to reopen as far as Tweedbank next month. But while there’s no doubt that Beeching deprived many villages of their link to the outside world, we should cherish the wildlife habitat he unintentionally created.

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