Restore has bought the 7,500-acre Emblehope Moor in north Northumberland for £8.5m and plans a 20-year restoration to bring back golden eagles, curlews, black grouse and beavers while repairing desiccated peat and removing non-native sitka spruce. The project still needs to raise about £4m to fund interventions and will repay a £4.5m loan from Triodos Bank. Restore founder Benedict Macdonald says investors will receive financial returns, including a two-times return, after which the site will be transferred into local community or charitable ownership rather than kept as a long-term private estate. Modeling suggests rewetted peat could store roughly 100,000 cubic metres of additional water, equivalent to about 40 Olympic swimming pools, and beavers may later be used to help retain that water. Emblehope is a site of special scientific interest already hosting merlin, prospecting golden eagles, trout and salmon in its streams, and nearby species include red squirrels and pine martens. Environmentalist Ben Goldsmith has described the growing cluster of restored estates in Northumberland as Britain’s Yellowstone, while neighboring projects such as a Wildlife Trusts campaign to buy the Rothbury estate are raising unprecedented sums for landscape-scale conservation.
