Open Country

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...

Yorkshire looks different in the dark. Helen Mark looks up into the heavens and deep underground for a new understanding of England's biggest county. Off-road cycling in the Dales becomes a lot more thrilling when you strike out into the dark and, armed with an infra-red nghtscope you realise just how busy the forests of the North York Moors National Park are after sunset. Helen will also be disco...

The Tironesian monks of Lindores Abbey were forcibly removed by Protestant firebrand John Knox in 1559 but they've left an extraordinary legacy for Tayside. The orchards they planted with native French varieties of pear, plum and apple were subdivided as the nearby town of Newburgh took shape. Every autumn the locals set out their stalls and sell purple pyramids of unusual plums and cartloads of t...

For a Christmas special Helen Mark visits the snow covered landscape of Swedish Lapland in search of the mythical, and often elusive, Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis. In Sami culture the lights are thought to emanate from the souls of the dead and must be treated with immense respect. Traditionally the Sami remained indoors during a display but today the chance of seeing the Northern Lights bri...

On the 5th of December 2013 the Lincolnshire community saw the worst flooding in 60 years. A tidal surge two metres above normal levels flooded coastal nature reserves and Gibraltar Point visitor centre was severely damaged. Two years on and Helen Mark finds a remarkable transformation taking place here and along the coastline with a series of iconic buildings and art installations including a new...

Why do witches and radical pacifists haunt Pendle Hill, one of Lancashire's best known landmarks? Helen Mark hears about the witch trials of 400 years ago, and the visionary Quaker founder, George Fox - all of whom are indelibly linked to this strikingly whale-backed hill. Producer: Mark Smalley.

Writer Iain Sinclair seeks the UK's oldest burial site in a cave along south Gower's windy clifftops. The 'Red Lady of Paviland' was interred in a cave 26,000 years ago, the bones decorated with red ochre. But, as he tells Helen Mark, "she" was in fact a he, buried with jewellery and alongside a mammoth's skull. This was at a time when the Bristol Channel was a tundra landscape. Best known for his...

Helen Mark visits Tollesbury Wick on the Essex coast. Situated on the mouth of Tollesbury Fleet and the Blackwater estuary, a giant sea wall snakes around the coast protecting both village and ancient grazing marshland. Helen meets the Wildlife Trust warden who cares for 650 hectares of unspoilt 'humpy bumpy' marshland and gets a surprise when she finds out what those bumps actually are. She learn...