New Moss Wood is located on the urban fringe of Cadishead, Salford and sits between Holcroft Moss SSSI and Little Woolden Moss. Its location is partly why this site is so important, contributing to a network of good quality, positively managed wildlife habitats within the Carbon Landscape. The site itself sits on deep peat reserves and years ago was part of the huge Chat Moss peat expanse. For the past 100 or so years, New Moss Wood was a market garden, where celery and lettuces were grown to supply to Manchester. In 1996 the Woodland Trust took on the site, planting a lot of the woodland that stands today and opening up rides where invertebrates and other wildlife now thrive in the tall herb habitats. Our work here through the carbon Landscape partnership has been to rewet around 30 hectares of the site, allowing us to create priority habitats, such as wet woodland, lowland raised bog and open water including ponds and blocked drainage systems. This work increases the available habitat that rare and declining species require such as Water Vole and Willow tit and provide us with the opportunity to reintroduce bog plants, which will then attract mossland wildlife that is in such low numbers these days. Just 3% of our lowland raised bog has survived and of that, most of it isn’t in positive management. We are now working on developing an adventure play trail, which will also tell the story of the site and landscape through art work and interpretation boards.
