Bid to protect rare Yorkshire Dales mountain plants launched

The Yorkshire Wildlife Trust said currently the rare species were confined to a few pockets of space across the mountain

Rare flowers only found in Yorkshire are to be protected as part of a scheme to restore a wildlife habitat.

Ingleborough in the Yorkshire Dales is a mix of meadows, limestone pavements and nature reserves - and is home to rarities such as Yorkshire sandwort.

Rachael Bice, from Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, said a new scheme could see the area become one of the world's "most significant limestone landscapes".

However, she said the Wild Ingleborough project was "a race against time".

The trust said plants like Yorkshire sandwort were "highly vulnerable" to the effects of climate change

It is estimated that Ingleborough, which is the second-highest mountain in the Yorkshire Dales, is home to a third of the UK's plant species.

However, it is the only place in the world where the "tiny white stars" of Yorkshire sandwort are found, a spokesperson for the trust said.

The area is also one of only four places in the UK where Teesdale violets can be seen, and one of just two places in Yorkshire where purple saxifrage grows.

The trust has opened a nursery where volunteers will help nurture plants from seed to plant back out into the landscape

Yorkshire Wildlife Trust said as part of the Wild Ingleborough project, it was cultivating the rarest of the area's limestone flowers, shrubs and trees at a special nursery where volunteers would help nurture plants from seed so they could be planted back out in the landscape.

The charity also said it had plans to connect wilder spaces, spanning from the valleys up to the top of Ingleborough itself.

Rare wildlife would then be able to "expand and flourish", a spokesperson said.

The scheme aimed to give rarer species the "best chance of survival", a spokesperson for the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust said

Ms Bice, the trust's chief executive, said the "critical haven" hosted rare holly ferns, lichens and mosses, as well as patches of wild thyme and rock-rose.

She added: "There is so much hope for the future of Wild Ingleborough and the wildlife that could thrive there if given more opportunity."

The work had the potential to make "a real difference on a truly significant scale", she added.

But Ms Bice warned time was running out to "save some of the last remnants of this area's most vulnerable plants".

Tony Juniper, chair of Natural England, said the Wild Ingleborough scheme was "an impressive landscape-scale restoration programme", which was "on the cusp of reaching new heights" for nature.