Sotshole Broad - a haven for local wildlife

Help keep this beautiful wild space safe for nature and people

Find out about the Sotshole Broad appeal

Only by chance did we see a woodcock today. As we wandered through the light woods on the edge of Sotshole Broad – just west of the road between Ranworth and South Walsham – enthusing about this future Norfolk Wildlife Trust reserve, a woodcock burst from winter-blackened brambles by our path. In two seconds it was gone.

There is a chance this was a Norfolk woodcock, raised on the life-rich valley-bottom soil here. It's just as likely, though, that our woodcock was a winter visitor, from Russia, from Finland, or from Scandinavia.

That’s the thing with nature: everything connected; everybody flowing through time and space. The drake teal on the secluded broad – piping amorously to dappled ducks – were also northern wanderers, lent to Broadland for the season. But the kingfisher, lancing across the water past them, was local. She had no doubt fledged not far from Sotshole Broad, in a burrow in the root plate of a fallen alder.

Everything connected: all these migratory and local lives entwined around a broad. Or rather, everything was once connected. But in the twenty-first century the connections holding together our Norfolk landscapes, and those bearing wild lives and stories to us from Africa and the Arctic, are wearing thin.

In the course of the twentieth century, human societies - more so in the UK than almost anywhere else - have eroded the habitats that support our planet's wildlife. We have unpicked the connections that enable wild species and genes to flow across the landscape. Most catastrophically of all, perhaps, we have severed the connections which have always bound us to the natural world.

Mindful of this disastrous severance of connections, and of ever-greater threats to nature, in 2023 we launched a strategy for Norfolk Wildlife Trust. Entitled A Wilder Norfolk for All, it bases all our future work on three principles: Improve, Expand, Connect.

It is with these three principles clearly in focus that we have taken the decision to purchase Sotshole Broad and its surrounding habitats: to protect and enhance their value for biodiversity and the environment and to make them accessible to visitors. Sotshole Broad has been offered to us, on very generous terms, by the family which has cared for it for twenty years. Some of the purchase price will be defrayed by a legacy. And some met by a significant donation. But to secure the site in full and to help make it accessible we still have £100,000 to raise.

This is no easy target. Nor is asking for your support a decision we take lightly. We have committed ourselves to purchasing Sotshole Broad because we must. What we can do here – for nature and for people – so perfectly aligns with the principles of our strategy that we cannot miss this opportunity.

Improve. Expand. Connect. Building on years of care by the late David Pooley, we can significantly improve Sotshole Broad’s habitats for wildlife and the environment. By reinstating light grazing, we hope to recover floristic diversity in the corridor of grassland along the north edge of the reserve. Grazing will also help us restore small areas of fen here.

By restoring natural water retention within the reserve’s extensive alder woods, we can increase habitat diversity, prevent flooding downstream, and improve water quality both on site and downstream. Continuing David’s restoration of the broad itself, we will improve water clarity for the celebrated food web of the Broads, from water fleas to otters.

More exciting still, the purchase of Sotshole Broad will connect and consolidate our priceless landholding along the River Bure. A short distance to the north, we have owned Ranworth and Cockshoot Broads for wildlife and people for almost 80 years. Here we hold swallowtail butterflies, common terns, otters and ospreys in our care. No distance east of Sotshole Broad, we have built a significant landholding for nature around Upton Broad over 50 years, protecting bitterns, hobbies, cranes, fen orchids, marsh pea and far more. Buying and restoring Sotshole Broad, we will bring a further 25 hectares of nature-rich land and water into a protected landscape.

Most excitingly of all, this purchase will help us bring you closer to the wildlife of the Bure. From our existing infrastructure at Ranworth Broad, we plan to develop a trail encompassing Ranworth, Malthouse, South Walsham and Sotshole Broads, allowing you to explore the bluebell wood, the alder carr, the reed fringe and the sunny grassland of our new reserve. This trail will hugely improve our educational offer to visitors in the Bure: reconnecting people with the wetlands in which we have always thrived.

This is our vision for Sotshole Broad, in line with our NWT strategy: Improved landscapes for biodiversity; Expanded habitats for wildlife and people; Connected reserves; Connected people with the land and its wild inhabitants.

We are excited to begin this adventure at Sotshole Broad. We’re grateful for the generosity the Pooley family and those who have already pledged support. And we are keen to take you with us on the journey. As we approach our centenary, we have never been more ambitious for nature and people in Norfolk.

There’s a woodcock in the alder carr by Sotshole Broad today. Perhaps it is local. Perhaps it’s visiting from Russia. Just like the teal on the broad, the kingfisher flashing past them, and the bluebells stirring in the woods, this woodcock depends on Sotshole Broad. It depends on a protected and connected landscape by the River Bure. And it depends on you.

Nick Acheson
NWT Wildlife Ambassador and author of The Meaning of Geese