Helen Mark is in Leicestershire, to discover how the 'Capability' Brown plans for Belvoir castle have finally come to fruition. Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, regarded as one of the greatest landscape architects, laid out his vision for how the landscape around this ancestral home should look, back in the 18th century. Some work was undertaken, but then a fire destroyed Belvoir castle. It was assumed all the Brown maps were lost too and plans for restoring the landscape were forgotten. However, th...
Dec 01, 2016•24 min
Wolverhampton, at the heart of the industrial revolution, has never been known for its beautiful landscape. The story goes that when Queen Victoria passed through she asked for the curtains in her carriage to be drawn because she was so offended by the sight of the town. Writer, Sathnam Sanghera grew up with a railway running through his back garden and an industrial estate running alongside his street. For this edition of Open Country he returns to his home town, now a city, and finds a burgeon...
Nov 24, 2016•25 min
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. David crosses the Sound to visit the Bird Observatory on the Calf of Man where the Manx Shearwater is ma...
Nov 17, 2016•24 min
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 but found in yourself. But he's dreading the twenty-two mile mark when he'll reach the 1200ft climb at...
Nov 10, 2016•25 min
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 have nothing to fear, except the Forestry Commission's marksmen. Adult males can reach twenty stone, r...
Nov 03, 2016•24 min
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 every aspect of his life, even the washing up, especially if you have to do it in 'horizontal snow'. Go...
Oct 27, 2016•24 min
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.
Sep 08, 2016•24 min
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 his opposition to the resort and how it will destroy a much-loved piece of land. Dr Hilary Ash takes...
Sep 01, 2016•25 min
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 is the vibrant artistic scene and a large helping of community spirit whose roots can be traced bac...
Aug 25, 2016•25 min
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 to visit, you have to park up and walk 3 miles, since the storms of 2013 washed parts of the road a...
Aug 18, 2016•24 min
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 Bodmin moor. Helen speaks to some of the people who live here about what tin mining means to them toda...
Aug 11, 2016•24 min
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 increasingly threatened by an array of problems and once thriving populations are now in decline. She tal...
Aug 04, 2016•24 min
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 Wrest Park in Bedfordshire to identify the trademarks of a classic Capability Brown landscape and f...
Jul 28, 2016•24 min
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 Operations Manager Russell Knight explains how they've encouraged fish species to return to their rivers, an...
Jul 23, 2016•24 min
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 boat. Fishing trips turned into dolphin-watching trips, and now Steve takes researchers out regular...
Jul 14, 2016•24 min
'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 volunteers about what it means to them and discovers the real history behind Bishop Auckland. She visi...
Jul 07, 2016•24 min
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 summer months Orkney enjoys 'Twilight All Night' due to its latitude, Helen discovers what this means for...
Jun 30, 2016•24 min
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 Moorhens, booming Bitterns and even a Marsh Frog before Dawn breaks to reveal a huge cast of Coots, Litt...
May 12, 2016•24 min
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 might have described the landscape and how it appears in some of his dialect poems. She meets some ra...
May 05, 2016•24 min
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 are the Travelling Stable Lasses, jockey Andrew Mullen (no, he hadn't eaten anything all day), racehor...
Apr 25, 2016•25 min
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 planting our very own 'Open Country' oak tree. Producer: Perminder Khatkar.
Apr 22, 2016•24 min
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. Dr George Nash explains how the site was used to train soldiers in trench warfare and mortar pract...
Apr 21, 2016•24 min
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 area, courtesy of the Gainsborough Trough, once a deep and dirty patch of sea. Now it produces twelve h...
Apr 13, 2016•24 min
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 legacy of the disaster, and how it's still remembered even though a primary school has been built on t...
Mar 04, 2016•25 min
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 the Empire, the first society in Britain concerned with protecting wildlife habitats. Today the bung...
Feb 11, 2016•24 min
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, and ochre have all been found in abundance in the Forest of Dean. Helen descends into the mysterious...
Jan 28, 2016•25 min
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 a major industry employing hundreds of people. It was cut for fuel, for horticulture, even animal fe...
Jan 21, 2016•24 min
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 discovering how the Brontë sisters filled the long nights in the Haworth Parsonage and mining precious Bl...
Jan 14, 2016•25 min
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 the apples that can ripen on the trees beyond Christmas. The monks are also credited with the creatio...
Jan 07, 2016•25 min
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 brings many visitors to this remote part of Sweden. Helen Mark hears about the mythology which surround...
Dec 17, 2015•24 min
