Training and Skills

We offer a range of training opportunities in rural and conservation skills.

Drystone walls and hedgerows are characteristic features of the landscape. Whilst their primary function is to enclose land and livestock, provide shelter for crops and animals and prevent soil erosion, they are also very important for wildlife. A valuable habitat in themselves, they also act as wildlife corridors, linking habitats across the landscape.

To ensure these historic features are cherished, maintained and remain part of our landscape far into the future, the traditional rural skills of drystone walling and hedgelaying must be kept alive.

We host an annual hedgelaying competition with the Lancashire & Westmorland Hedgelaying Association, and occasional hedgelaying training events. These are advertised on the What's On section of our website, alongside other training events.

Our Tuesday Habitat & Access Management and monthly Saturday Friends of Warton Crag groups are a great way of building skills if you're available. These volunteer groups regularly assist with scrub clearance, drystone wall repairs, coppicing, wildlife surveys and other practical conservation tasks.

Our volunteers are offered the opportunity to undertake free First Aid training to help them support our programmes.

If you're interested in building your experience surveying wildlife we work with Butterfly Conservation to help coordinate butterfly surveys in the National Landscape and we also have a plant recording scheme with the BCCIC.

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