The Scottish site where bumblebees now thrive

Three years on from the start of Rewilding Denmarkfield, its logo seems like a prophecy: above a spear thistle, Scotland’s national flower, flies a bee. 

The project made headlines in Britain when it recently announced that between 2021 and 2023, the number of bumblebees counted across its 90 acres rocketed from 35 to 4,056. This result was a delightful surprise for the Rewilding Denmarkfield team, who are working to turn three former barley fields into a nature oasis.    

The onetime farm used to be just a small piece in a patchwork of intensive arable fields surrounding the city of Perth in central Scotland. Project manager and ecologist Ellie Corsie already knew it well: she’d lived nearby for years, often running the path that separates Denmarkfield from the River Tay. 

Here, Corsie speaks with Rewilding Magazine about the rebirth of the site, her role in it and the project’s wider significance for the people of Perthshire.

Amy and Graham Allen bought the farm in 2017. I heard through the grapevine that they wanted to restore the land but didn’t know where to start. I got in touch with them with a rough plan that I drew up for free because I wanted to see it happen. They ended up hiring me to do it.

From the official beginning of the project in spring 2021, we took a few actions to help speed regeneration. We planted pockets of species which were thin or non-existent across the site, including blackthorn, hawthorn and a variety of flowering herbs. The idea of this was to start “seed islands,” which would foster growth all around them. And because the fields had been drained and smoothed out in the past, we carved shallow burns and scrapes with machinery to roughen up and re-wet some of the land.

But really, the biggest intervention in terms of impact was simply to stop farming. We know from the counts we conducted at the start that 85 native plant species have since found their way to Denmarkfield on their own. Many of these are ones we’re used to calling weeds, like smooth hawksbeard and spear thistle, which bumblebees absolutely love. Tree regeneration is happening too, and I dream of mature oak trees standing here in 300 years. That said, we want to interweave more closed habitats with more open ones, which is why since 2023 we’ve been borrowing a small herd of Aberdeen Angus cattle to graze the fields around August to October. 

The power of our somewhat hands-off approach has been vindicated by the massive increase in bumblebee numbers. What’s more, the number of bumblebee species has doubled from five to 10. We’ve now got the “big eight,” including tree and buff-tailed, but also gypsy cuckoo and field cuckoo. Like their bird namesake, these latter two species act as parasites by laying their eggs in the nests of other bumblebees. This in itself is an exciting indicator of the sheer abundance of bumblebee nests that Denmarkfield has become home to. 

We didn’t plan to specifically attract bumblebees. Indeed, we know from other data we’ve collected that the abundance of butterflies has tripled and the number of red-listed bird species – including skylark and grasshopper warbler – has gone from 11 to 17. But bumblebees are great indicators of ecosystem health. Even better, there was already a national monitoring scheme in place for them called BeeWalk, run by the Bumblebee Conservation Trust. So as well as being able to feed our data into the national scheme, the local people we’ve trained to use BeeWalk’s method have gained the know-how to monitor other sites too. It’s another way that Denmarkfield’s work can tie into wider efforts for nature restoration and support community engagement.

From the outset, we’ve wanted to fully capitalize on the opportunity of having a rewilding site amongst so many people. We have the Friends of Denmarkfield group, now more than 100 members strong. They get involved in work parties for things like balsam bashing and orchard care, do wildlife counts and help to manage the 50 community allotment plots we’ve created. The allotments have helped to engage an even wider pool of people. We’ve also provided environmental education sessions to around 150 children and young people. A lot of the local schools want to give their students this kind of experience but don’t have the resources, so that has been another amazing way to give children – and their parents – a richer access to nature. 

All these connections are only going to become more important. Denmarkfield sits outside Perth for the time being, but will be absorbed into the city as it continues to expand. One of the main reasons the owners decided to rewild the site was to prevent it being built on, and to safeguard it as a place for nature and people. It isn’t always easy to balance those two interests. For example, we have a lot of ground-nesting birds but also dogs being walked here. But we want the land to be as open to people as possible. For them to enjoy it – and to see first-hand the power of rewilding for nature restoration. 

Early on we started photo point monitoring and this has been particularly valuable for helping us to show people how things have changed, and the process of that change. I’d strongly recommend setting up photo points at the start of any rewilding project.

But my most important advice is this: Don’t give in to the pressure to Do Stuff. Wait and see what grows (or arrives – I’ve got my hopes pinned on beavers). 

One of the things I didn’t expect was how we’d get so much smooth hawksbeard, enough to make a sea of yellow in the summer. It’s a plant with small flowers growing at the end of skinny stems. These can’t support the weight of a bumblebee, so they drop near the ground when one lands on them. The result is a vista of flowerheads and bees constantly pinging up and down. It’s charming.