Open Country

David Lindo is the Urban Birder. He loves the birds he finds in parks and open spaces in the city but for this weeks Open Country he sets sail for the open spaces and cliffs of the Isle of Man, a landscape he has always wanted to visit. Stuck out in the middle of the Irish Sea The Isle of Man is a birders paradise with rare sightings of elusive birds such as choughs, hen harriers and falcons. Davi...

Helen Mark follows Snowdonia Marathon and meets some of the people tackling this challenging course. Starting and finishing in Llanberis, the race encircles Wales' highest mountain of Snowdon, and rises to over a thousand feet in places. Andy John, Bishop of Bangor is taking on the Marathon for the third time, and he describes the sensation from running the course as being lost in the landscape bu...

Helen Mark travels to the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire to encounter some of the wild boar who have made a home there in the last ten years. The Forest clearly suits them because their numbers are growing exponentially, with over 1500 feral animals at the last count. The population can almost triple in a year, and with no cold winters or culture of boar-hunting in the UK, the wild boar here ha...

Guest presenter Ian Marchant meets people who live off-grid in his part of the world, near Presteigne in mid-Wales. There's Bob, who started his off-grid life on the hippy trail in the sixties, driving over-land to Afghanistan and bringing back the first Afghan coats to the London fashion scene. Now he lives in a wood, still making jewellery and living in his van. For him, there's adventure in eve...

Seamus Heaney grew up in Bellaghy in Northern Ireland and his poetry features many of the people who lived there and the views he saw there. Helen Mark visits Bellaghy to discover the real places which inspired so many well loved words and meets the people who live there to find out what Heaney's work means to them.

A new golf resort has been proposed for Hoylake in Wirral. Helen Mark explores how this will affect the local green belt and the birdlife and wildlife that live there. Helen speaks to Andrew Needham from the Council for the Protection of Rural England about what constitutes green belt land and why a golf course may be permissible. John Hutchinson from the Hoylake Golf Resort Committee talks about...

Guest presenter Helen Baxendale visits Belper in Derbyshire, to explore the landscape for traces of the town's industrial past. Belper is part of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site (as designated by UNESCO in 2001), so she expected to find the river-power and the ironstone that made the town a perfect site for Jedediah Strutt to locate his mills in the eighteenth century. More surprising...

Helen Mark spends the day wit the only full-time lifeboat crew in the UK, based on Spurn Point. This unique landscape is a strip of land, 3.5 miles long and only 50m wide in places. Until recently the station was occupied by the station staff and their families, but the fragility of the Spurn Point sandbank that links it to the mainland means it is no longer fit for so many people. And if you want...

The largest mechanical puppet ever made in the UK "The Man Engine" has been striding out across Cornwall to celebrate 10 years since Cornwall's mining landscapes were awarded the status of UNESCO world heritage sites. Standing 10 metres high this 'Man Engine' will visit each of the 10 heritage areas across Cornwall and Helen Mark meets him and his creator Will Coleman in Liskeard and Minions on Bo...

The Orkney Isles are one of the best places for wildlife in the country. Species such as seals and puffins which are hard to find in other parts of the UK can often be spotted in Orkney with ease. Helen Mark visits to discover for herself the incredibly rich beaches, cliff tops and moorland on the islands. Despite the display of rare species on offer Helen finds that even here marine life is incre...

Lancelot 'Capability' Brown is heralded as the Shakespeare of gardening who in the eighteen century designed an estimated 170 landscapes including Blenheim Palace, Warwick Castle and Highclere Castle. To mark the 300th anniversary of his birth, Helen Mark discovers how his naturalistic landscapes changed the face of the countryside in the eighteenth century and continue to endure today. She visits...

Helen Mark visits Heathrow Airport to discover what steps they take to encourage biodiversity and assesses the impact the proposed third runway will have should the decision be made for it to go ahead. Heathrow has thirteen sites of Conversation, and Helen speaks to to the Airport's Biodiversity Manager Adam Cheeseman about the species he finds there including the Black Bee. Environmental Operatio...

Patrick Aryee travels to West Wales to meet the dolphin-watchers of New Quay, and to encounter some members of the largest group of bottlenose dolphins off the coast of the UK. New Quay is home to the Cardigan Bay Marine Wildlife Centre, which was set up in 1996 by Steve Hartley, a former fisherman, because he wanted people to know about the amazing array of marine wildlife he saw from his fishing...

'Kynren' is set across a landscaped stage which is the size of 5 football pitches and involves over 1000 local volunteers. Organizers hope that it will transform Bishop Auckland and bring many visitors to the area for years to come. The story will explore 2000 years of British history from Roman times through the Saxons and Vikings to Industrial times and beyond. Helen Mark hears from the local vo...

Orkney has a great heritage of music so for this weeks Open Country Helen Mark visits the St Magnus International Festival of Music and Arts. Now in its 40th year St Magnus was founded by the late Orkney-based composer, and Master of the Queen's Music, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. This years festival will celebrate his legacy as well as shining a light on new talent from the islands. During the summe...

Brett Westwood presents a special programme as Open Country joins forces with the European Broadcasting Union and RTE in Ireland to follow the Dawn Chorus from East to West across Europe. Sunday 1 May was International Dawn Chorus Day and from midnight until six am, Brett Westwood sat in RSPB Ham Wall in Somerset broadcasting about what he heard. The silence of the night is broken by belching Moor...

Helen Mark explores the Lincolnshire Wolds through the poetry of Victorian Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The Lincolnshire Wolds are a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, remote and in some ways little-changed since Tennyson was born here, in the village of Somersby, in 1809. Helen meets dialect speakers, like Tennyson, whose 'first language was Lincolnshire'. She'll find out how he m...

Helen Mark spends a day at Southwell Races in rural Nottinghamshire. It's one of the smallest and most rural racetracks in Britain, but it's also one of the busiest. Helen follows a day in the life of the race-track, meeting some of the people who make it happen. She talks about dreams and 'babies' (two year old horses) with trainer David Brown as one of his horses has a swim in the pool. There ar...

Helen Mark visits the National Forest as its marks 25 years since it started to create huge areas of woodland. The entire area covers 200 square miles across the boundary of the East and West Midlands over the three counties of Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Leicestershire. Helen explores how this regeneration through nature has impacted upon the lives of the people in the area. She begins by plant...

Helen Mark visits the Iron-Age Hillfort in Oswestry, Shropshire to discover why it's the "Stonehenge of the Iron Age" and how plans for housing might affect the landscape. Dr Rachel Pope tells Helen why the size and scale of the Western entrance ramparts help make the Hillfort one of the most important Iron-Age monuments in England, and why it's a symbol for community and trade rather than defence...

Forget Texas! There's oil in the plains of Lincolnshire. But not many people seem to notice. Helen Mark travels to the market town of Gainsborough to discover more about the nodding donkeys that pepper its landscape. Oil wells sit comfortably fringed by a housing estate, the leisure centre and the golf course. It turns out that the East Midlands is the UK's second largest inshore oil producing are...

Felicity Evans asks how the valleys of south Wales near Caerphilly have fared since the mines closed. She visits new parklands that have been planted where the collieries once stood. She begins at Senghenydd, site of two mining disasters just one hundred years ago, one of them the worst ever experienced at a UK mine. Former teacher in the village and now a broadcaster, Roy Noble reflects on the le...

In the final episode of this series Helen Mark visit Woodwalton Fen in Cambridgeshire with writer Simon Barnes to discover the lost landscape which inspired Charles Rothschild to draw up the Rothschild list. This list of wild places in need of preservation helped establish modern conservation ideas and in 1912 Rothschild established the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves for Britain and...

Helen Mark is in the Forest of Dean in search of mysterious geological formations known as 'scowles'. These semi-natural features in the landscape are thought to be unique to the Forest of Dean but are plentiful in this area. They are crater-like features in the woodland that have been eroded over time by water-action and exploited by miners through the centuries for their bounty: iron-ore, coal,...

Helen Mark uncovers why peat makes the Somerset Levels a special place to visit, not just for the wildlife. Since earliest times humans have exploited this natural resource. Its wetlands once supported Lake Villagers whose secrets lay buried deep beneath the feet of the modern archaeologist keen to uncover what these wetlands preserves for millennia. A mere 50 years ago the extraction of peat was...