73 - Charnwood : Detailed Statements of Environmental Opportunity

This section expands on the Headline Statements of Environmental Opportunity and provides further detail on each of the Statements of Environmental Opportunity.

SEO 1

SEO 1: Protect, manage and promote the important geology and cultural interests of Charnwood, including the internationally significant Precambrian geology, the characteristic rocky outcrops, the unique country parks, the manor houses and the medieval monastic buildings, to ensure access and interpretation, and for people to enjoy and understand these important resources.

For example by:

• Protecting and promoting understanding of the Charnwood Forest geology for the contribution it makes as a historical, scientific and educational resource.
• Protecting the distinctive rocky outcrops by ensuring that they remain unobscured and visually accessible – as they are crucial to Charnwood’s sense of place.
• Recognising that aggregate from the Charnwood quarries is an important national resource, but continuing to make wise use of the mineral resource and effectively screening the impacts of quarrying.
• Where appropriate, restoring previous mineral sites to open access sites, ensuring good and safe access. This will benefit education, scientific research, geodiversity and biodiversity, will increase public access to interesting geological features and will allow people to view (and possibly climb) the exposed outcrops and rockfaces.
• Working in partnership to implement the Local Geodiversity Action Plan.
• Encouraging the use of local building stone to reinforce local distinctiveness and to maintain historic buildings.
• Providing the necessary recreational infrastructure to meet the significant demand without detriment to the landscape.
• Maintaining and improving the distinctive drystone walls that bound the parks, as well as those found in the wider landscape.
• Protecting (through management) the open and elevated views across the upland landscape, which provide a sense of inspiration and a tranquil recreational resource.
• Protecting the historic designed parklands and their settings.
• Supporting and promoting participation in the Charnwood Forest Regional Park.

SEO 2

SEO 2: Conserve the strong settlement character of the inner Charnwood villages and ensure that development is sympathetic to the character of this rural NCA, surrounded by large and expanding urban areas. Maximise the green infrastructure and sustainable recreation opportunities.

For example by:

• Protecting the distinctive inner Charnwood villages, with their local building materials and linear settlement pattern, recognising that large- scale development would be severely detrimental to their character.
• Protecting the character of the larger villages surrounding Charnwood Forest, and ensuring that new development and expansion are sensitively designed and located.
• Protecting the remnant ridge-and-furrow earthworks from modern agricultural practices and development pressure. Enhancing historic landscapes by working with land managers to alter any cultivation practices that could damage the historic landscape patterns.
• Planning to limit the visual impact of any new development by locating it on previously developed land or close to existing settlements.
• Carrying out additional tree and woodland planting around settlement fringes to help integrate new development into the landscape, and to enhance existing well wooded village peripheries.
• Enhancing green infrastructure links between Leicester, Loughborough and Coalville, to promote the excellent recreational opportunities offered in Charnwood and to enhance ecological corridors which will encourage the spread of species and thus enhance adaptation to climate change impacts. A good example of this is the 6Cs Strategy Green Infrastructure work.
• Planning to limit (where possible) the encroachment of urbanising influences into areas with a high tranquillity rating, and where light pollution is presently limited.
• Ensuring that designs for the conversion of traditional buildings maintain their original scale and character.
• Ensuring that local plans and policies recognise and support the Charnwood Forest Regional Park.

SEO 3

SEO 3: Protect and significantly increase the extent and quality of the unimproved grasslands, heathlands, open waterbodies and streams, to enhance biodiversity, ecological networks, water availability and quality, climate regulation and sense of place.

For example by:

• Managing heathland in favourable condition by controlling the encroaching bracken and scrub. This will ensure that the habitat of rare invertebrates (such as the Charnwood spider) and important birds (such as the nightjar) are maintained.
• Seeking opportunities to re-create heathland and grassland by increasing their quality and extent, and by strengthening the interconnectivity of the networks.
• Protecting the surviving ridge-and-furrow from modern agricultural practices and development pressures.
• Promoting the management of traditional field boundaries, including drystone walls and species-rich enclosure hedgerows.
• Creating a habitat mosaic of heathland, woodland and semi-natural grassland, creating structural diversity and a variety of flowering plants. This will provide breeding sites and a food source for pollinators.
• Maintaining the fast, clear, well-oxygenated streams that support an abundance of wildlife, including rare species such as crayfish and brook lamprey. The Charnwood caddis fly is found in both Burleigh Brook and Wood Brook, but nowhere else in the country.
• Preventing the introduction of signal crayfish to unaffected waterbodies.
• Conserving and extending riparian habitats such as bogs, marshes, reedbeds and wet alder woodland along the streams and surrounding the reservoirs.
• Promoting the extensive management of agricultural land within key waterbody catchments, to improve the water quality of streams and to increase biodiversity.
• Supporting the appropriate management of semi-natural Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP) habitats for the benefits this brings to biodiversity networks, as well as to facilitate the build-up of soil carbon, thereby improving soil quality and benefiting climate regulation.

SEO 4

SEO 4: Where appropriate, manage and expand the native woodlands throughout Charnwood to reinforce the wooded character, to increase the potential for biomass, access and recreation, and to regulate climate change and water quality.

For example by:

• Extending and creating native woodlands where appropriate, through creation and restoration schemes in areas where this will not undermine the existing and future biodiversity resource or the mixed land-use character of Charnwood.
• Promoting sustainable woodland management techniques (such as coppicing, pollarding and wood fuel production) to increase carbon sequestration and the resilience of tree species to climate change and disease.
• Supporting The National Forest incentives to increase appropriate woodland creation and restoration, and to open up woodland access routes to the public.
• Extending woodland around settlements and infrastructure developments to filter light pollution, reduce sound pollution and reduce the visual impacts of further urbanisation.
• Protecting and managing veteran trees, to maintain this resource throughout Charnwood.
• Increasing woodland creation and restoration, and strengthening hedgerow networks to aid in the capture of chemicals and nutrients before they enter the groundwater. This will also filter sediments and organic matter, preventing them from travelling into open waterbodies.
• Creating woodland sensitively so as not to reduce the limited arable land, or obscure valued views and rock exposures.