A new community reserve in Fife: turning tarmac into wildlife
In the midst of the climate and biodiversity crisis it is easy to feel helpless. Many parts of Fife have been developed and the need for intensive agriculture has removed much of the wildlife. But in Crail, the local community has been turning the tide by rewilding a brownfield site close to the town, turning an area of neglected tarmac into a nature reserve, bringing back wetland and meadow habitats.
The East Neuk area around Crail has no wetlands beyond the size of a pond and only a handful of meadows. But the community has now created a rewilded area of wetland and meadow at South Kilminning. The journey started in lockdown, when appreciation of what was on – or not on – your doorstep increased. South Kilminning was an 14.3 Ha area of tarmac, amenity grassland, regenerating woodland and coastal scrub owned by Fife Council. Much of the site was formerly part of Crail airfield and has been extensively covered with tarmac. Although the site was valued by local dog walkers and bird watchers during the migration season, it was in need of attention. A derelict, post-industrial area used for fly tipping and other antisocial activities, but with potential to be restored for nature.
There was already a strong feeling in the Crail community about how important the local environment was. There had been a two year long community consultation during 2018 and 2029 (the Crail Charette) and maintaining, enhancing and creating new natural spaces in and around the town emerged as the top priority for both locals and visitors. On the strength of this, in 2020, the community wrote a successful Community Land Asset Transfer application, with a plan to turn the site from an eyesore, costing Fife Council money, into a community owned and managed nature reserve. This would then add a valuable natural benefit to the area instead of a cost. Plus, of course, creating more space for nature, helping to improve Scotland’s biodiversity. The plan was to plant trees, to open up a field drain, to run this into a very large pond dug on the site and to use the soil removed to cover the tarmac. To create a woodland, wetland and meadow in an area where almost all of these habitats and their associated wildlife are now scarce because of development and intensive farming.
With Kilminning in community ownership, it was now time to create the habitats. There were three challenges. Changing the culture, so that people who previously viewed Kilminning as little better than a dump could also see it as a valuable site for nature. Raising the funds to create habitats in the site. And creating a habitat restoration plan that could work within the many constraints of the site.
Changing the minds of the antisocial users of the site was started by managing access to Kilminning. Out of way, neglected looking car parks don’t bring out the best in people, whereas beautiful, natural places tend to. So by restricting car access to most of the site by placing earth bunds around the tarmac areas – although still retaining primary car access for elderly and less able people – it became much harder to use the site unless you were prepared to get out of your car and walk around. This simple step of restricting vehicles to the public car park has radically decreased the amount of bad behaviour. Fly tipping now occurs at a rate of about once every year, compared to once every couple of months before the community took ownership; antisocial camping from vehicles has decreased from Glastonbury Festival levels on a sunny July weekend to almost zero, and littering generally has decreased by about 75%. Within a year of managing access, the Crail community had moved to a position where it could consider making big changes to improve the site, confident that the message that Kilminning was now for nature as well as people, was gaining ground.
Tree planting also helped start the process of changing people’s minds as well as the habitat. A tree planting weekend was arranged at the end of March 2022. Over 2,500 trees (a mix of native species: alder, rowan, birch, willow, blackthorn, hawthorn, oak, dogwood, hazel, and cherry, provided by Footprint East Neuk) were planted by 152 different people on two days (a few came both days), with the youngest a 1 year old and the oldest 78. People came from as far as Dunfermline, Kirkaldy, Tayport and St Andrews, but mostly from Crail. One year on, over 95% of the trees were still thriving, testament to the volunteers’ careful planting.
Raising the funds was the second challenge. Although wetlands and meadows have been present at Kilminning in the past, hundreds of years of farming, drainage, and more recently, development as an airfield, had left the site as more or less unsuitable for natural rewilding. The community could have left Kilminning as it was, to let nature take its course, but the tarmac and amenity grassland areas would take decades to become more natural, and a wetland would never return. Major habitat restoration work was necessary. The community needed to return the piped water sources to the surface and get rid of the tarmac. Both of these needed major and costly engineering solutions, and so fundraising was needed. In March 2022, the community applied for a NatureScot grant as part of the Nature Restoration Fund: money specifically set aside by the Scottish Government to help transform local sites to tackle the biodiversity crisis. The community needed to provide some matched funding as part of the application, and raised about £50,000. This was achieved this by a couple of rounds of Crowd Funding with over 100 donors from all over Fife and Scotland along with generous donations from Stantec (an environmental civil engineering firm), the Fife Bird Club, the Crail Common Good Fund and many free offers from experts to carry out the work that would be needed, such as badger and bat surveys. The application was successful and the Crail Community Partnership (the charity set up to facilitate the community projects identified during the Crail charette) was awarded £220,000 – to be spent by March 2024. It was now show time – the community had to make it happen, and within the next two years.
And so the final challenge. On paper removing some tarmac and digging a pond seems very simple. But this is where the problems really started for the community project. Crail Airfield is a scheduled historic monument, protected at the highest level in Scottish law. The tarmac the community might have wanted to change was listed. Historical tarmac! Historic Scotland were positive about the project but couldn’t move with respect to a listed monument. But they did give permission for the tarmac to be covered with soil, as long as it was covered first with a protective geotextile membrane to preserve the tarmac for future generations to appreciate. The restriction also meant that the location of the pond was constrained to grassy areas outside the tarmac area. And then another problem. This was where historical records show that there may be the remains of medieval chapel and associated graveyard. Farmers in the area had been ploughing up human bones in the area for the last 250 years. If any digging was going to happen in the area, the community needed to show that any archaeology had already been lost or had never been there at all. Demonstrating that something is absolutely not there is difficult, but a previous archaeological investigation in the 1990s turned up nothing at all in the area where the pond might best be dug. Nevertheless, a full archaeological survey was carried out using ground penetrating radar in March 2023. Again, this turned up nothing of likely historical interest. But it did confirm that there was a sewage pipe along the edge of the pond site, another potential showstopper for digging a wetland. Between the tarmac, the potential archaeology and the sewage pipe there was only about enough space for a football pitch – luckily, just big enough to fit in the size of wetland that could be constructed within the community’s funding budget.
The listed tarmac and the potential archaeology delayed the habitat restoration for about a year, but finally in April 2023, with one year of funding to go, it was time to draw plans and get planning permission. Any development project, even if it aims to improve the environment, is subject to full planning constraints and permission, and so there were further hoops to jump through. In the end a full archaeological watching brief was a condition of development. This meant an archaeologist had to watch every bucket of soil dug to double check that nothing of historical significance had been missed. And of course, should anything be found, this would probably mean the project having to be abandoned. The community also had to demonstrate its environmental credentials and show that the work wouldn’t harm local badgers, bats or birds in the adjacent Special Protection Area of the Firth of Forth, even as it improved habitats for other species. Eventually, the final permissions were put in place in autumn 2023. By now there was a real sense of urgency, with the funding from NatureScot having to be spent by the following March.
The project was put out to tender which was won by a local Dundee civil engineering company, Kilmac, that specialises on ground works, more typically that are done when building houses or roads. Their enthusiasm for the project – as a local, community venture, which was aiming to make things better for biodiversity – along with their willingness to get the job done immediately also made them perfect for the job. By December 2023 everything was lined up to get the wetland dug and the tarmac covered in a six week period in the New Year. There were still a couple of uncertainties. The archaeologist watching the dig could stop the project at any time if anything remotely historical was found. And the rock under the pond site could turn out to be hard, literally, to extract.
Kilmac arrived on site as planned on January 8th and there were eight days of nail biting until the archaeologist confirmed the site was clear of history. In fact the contractors discovered the whole area had been dug up already, probably during the construction of the airfield, with modern clay and rubble covering the site to a depth of about two meters. This also mostly solved the rock issue, and where rock remained, it was soft, easy to remove sandstone. After 4 weeks the pond was dug and the tarmac was covered in the soil from the pond. Then the pond was lined with clay, carefully profiled to provide shallow areas for wildlife. The final, important job was to secure the water supply, so the pond would never dry up and also so that the water level could be controlled by varying the height of a small dam by the outflow. A large flow of water from local field drains ran under the tarmac in a pipe, and this was exposed and rerouted into the middle of the pond. The effect was immediate – the pond half-filled in a couple of days, until it reached the new outflow. A little bit more digging and landscaping later the pond was finished on the 26th February. On schedule (at last) and on budget. The project had just scraped in.
The pond has now filled up and is gently overspilling to create a marsh, restoring the burn flowing down to the sea. It is ready for its first dragonflies, frogs and moorhens as it starts to be colonised by plants over the coming summer. Although the community is watching and waiting to see what happens with the wetland before adding any plants to it, it has plans to accelerate the meadow. On Sunday March 31st, over 80 volunteers turned out to plant the meadow using local Scottish wildflower meadow seed mixes. We can now look forward to a wildflower meadow later in the summer. Blackthorns were planted to manage access and a thorough litter pick was carried out.
Over the next few years, the signs of the engineering to make the wetland should disappear and nature will colonise the site, taking advantage of the new habitats that have been created. Kilminning has had a long and interesting history, but it now has an exciting future. One small bit more of Scotland has been restored for wildlife, giving an example to other communities about what can be done, even in apparently derelict sites. But more importantly, giving a sense of hope that when we set our minds to it, we can make the environment better.
We would like to thank our funders (details below): the Scottish Government’s Nature Restoration Fund and NatureScot that awarded us the main grant (particular thanks to Fiona Fisher); Stantec (particular thanks to Neil Maclean); the Crail Common Good Fund and the local and county Councillors that made our award possible; Fife Bird Club; Eden Ecology for the badger survey; Mark Ireland and his team; James Stockwell, Willie Irvine. Thanks to Kilmac for their very positive and can do attitude throughout the construction phase of the project; their team was an absolute pleasure to work with. Thanks to AOC Archaeology for their thorough demonstration that archaeology wasn’t an issue for the site.
| Cost Description | |
| Project design, management, planning and tenders | £25,400.00 |
| Ground investigations | £3,928.07 |
| Badger survey | £800.00 |
| Ecological survey | £1,000.00 |
| Planning permission | £3,000.00 |
| Topographic survey | £2,500.00 |
| Kilmac wetland construction | £199,856.08 |
| Geotextile membrane | £6,930.00 |
| Archaelogical Survey GPR | £6,576.00 |
| Archeaological WSI | £210.00 |
| Archeaologist watching brief and report | £3,348.00 |
| Wildflower seed | £2,148.90 |
| Blackthorn bushes | £200 |
| Total costs | £255,897.05 |
| Funding Description | |
| NRF Funding | 220,587.87 |
| Stantec work in kind | 10,000.00 |
| Common Good Fund | 13,600.00 |
| Fife Bird Club | 2,000.00 |
| Eden Ecology badger survey donation | 800.00 |
| Will Cresswell ecological survey donation | 1,000.00 |
| Blackthorn donations | 200.00 |
| CCP crowd funding | 7,709.18 |
| Total funds | £255,897.05 |
Wild Crail 