On a barren hillside on the Isle of Man, a band of volunteers kneel in the drizzle, tucking hazel, oak and willow saplings into the damp soil. Their spades bite into earth that, for generations, has been grazed bare by sheep. A faint rainbow arches across the slope, an almost too-perfect omen for what they hope to achieve.
If all goes well, in 15 or 20 years’ time this ground will be carpeted with ferns and mosses. The air will be thick with the smell of wet leaves and decay. The saplings will mature into trees, bearded with lichens. A rainforest will return.
Few realise it, but Britain is a rainforest nation. Once, a fifth of the country was covered by “temperate rainforest” — also known as the Atlantic or Celtic rainforest — stretching in a great green band along the western seaboard, from Cornwall to the Hebrides.
Mosses, liverworts and ferns festooned the trunks of ancient oaks, dripping from branches like underwater coral. Damp and cool, they were places that inspired myth and literature: the enchanted groves of the Mabinogion, the mist-wrapped woods of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the “otherworldly” forests that recur through British folklore and fantasy.
Today, less than one per cent of Britain is covered in rainforest. What remains is scattered and fragmented. Much of it clings on in damp ravines and shaded valleys in Wales, western Scotland and the West Country. The rest has been lost to centuries of logging, grazing and clearance.
However, in recent years, an ambitious movement has begun to reverse that loss. From the Atlantic oakwoods of Eryri (Snowdonia) to the glens of Devon and the hillsides of the Isle of Man, volunteers and conservationists are planting the foundations of a new rainforest age.
Maria Vole, a volunteer at the National Trust’s tree nursery in Eryri, said: “It’s like building a cathedral. You know you won’t live to see it finished, but doesn’t that make it more rewarding?”
She helps to care for some 23,000 young trees: elder, hawthorn, rowan, oak. Each is raised from locally collected seed, watered, weeded and, in her words, “talked to”. For Maria, volunteering offers both purpose and solace. “It’s a feel-good thing,” she said. “I worry a lot about the climate crisis, but this is something physical I can do. To help trees grow.”
She describes the remaining rainforest fragments near her home: “You’ve got millions of shades of green, mosses and lichens covering everything — the trees, the rocks, the riversides. It’s magical. You step inside and you feel instantly connected to something ancient.”
In Eryri, as elsewhere, that magic has endured only in pockets. Centuries of sheep grazing have kept hillsides bald. In many areas, invasive rhododendron — imported by Victorian gardeners — has smothered native flora, preventing regeneration. But change is coming.
A national temperate rainforest strategy for England, published in 2023, set out plans to map, protect and restore these habitats. Scotland and Wales have launched their own partnerships, focusing on deer control, rhododendron clearance and connecting isolated fragments. The National Trust, the Woodland Trust and the Wildlife Trusts are co-ordinating long-term replanting schemes, often relying heavily on volunteers like Maria.
On the Isle of Man, Andree Dubbeldam, a senior woodland ranger for the Wildlife Trust, is overseeing one of the most ambitious attempts to recreate a rainforest ecosystem. The island is now largely stripped of trees. “But we know, partly from surviving fragments, that rainforests once ringed the island’s uplands,” he said.
Seb Swithinbank, lead woodlands estate ranger, teaching volunteers on the Isle of Man
LIAM GILMAN FOR THE TIMES
At three sites — Glen Auldyn, Creg y Cowin and Glion Darragh — volunteers are working to restore that cover. They’re planting native species: hazel and willow in the damp hollows, oaks and birches on steeper slopes, and even juniper, once widespread but now rare. A local nursery propagates trees from Manx acorns — hybrids unique to this small island in the Irish Sea.
A volunteer holds a horsetail at Eairy-ny-Suie, Isle of Man
LIAM GILMAN FOR THE TIMES
“We don’t want to bring in seed unnecessarily,” said Dubbeldam. “This is about restoring what’s local, what belongs.”
In some replanting projects, trees are “sabre-planted” on steep slopes, angled almost horizontally into the hillside, so they will grow outward, then up. Others are fenced to keep out sheep. Alongside the trees, volunteers on the Isle of Man transplant ancient woodland flowers — wood anemones, primroses, orchids — to recreate the layered richness of the original habitat.
Volunteers and staff from the Wildlife Trust
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The aim, Dubbeldam says, is to think in decades and centuries. “What we’re planting now is just the nursery crop. These trees will live and die, and their successors will replace them. We’re trying to set in motion a system that can sustain itself long after we’re gone.”
Britain’s rainforests are globally significant. They harbour species found almost nowhere else: rare mosses, liverworts and lichens that depend on the perpetual damp. Some sites host hundreds of such species — tiny, beautiful, slow-growing organisms that have survived since the last ice age. The forests also help to lock up carbon, stabilise soils, and regulate the flow of water. As the country experiences warmer weather as in recent years, they may become even more crucial as wildlife refuges.
However, to reach that point, they will need time and care. “Rewilding”, which suggests land will be abandoned to nature, is not quite the right term. Grazing and invasive plants remain constant threats; most existing rainforests are small, isolated, vulnerable fragments. The restoration work, often done by volunteers in the rain, is labour-intensive and unglamorous.
Volunteers Michelle Watson and Jessica Blacksley replant trees on the Isle of Man
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The end results, they explain, make it worthwhile. “It’s the colours,” says Maria. “The autumn berries on the rowans, the heather, the bracken, everything buzzing with insects in the summer. It’s unique and magical.” She hopes that one day more people will get to experience it.
Areas of forest on the Isle of Man need help from replanting efforts
LIAM GILMAN FOR THE TIMES
Back on the Isle of Man, the rainbow has faded. At the end of the day, the volunteers will trudge to their cars, sodden boots heavy with mud. Behind them, a hillside peppered with saplings stretches toward the river at the bottom of the valley. It is not much to look at yet. But one day this may be a rainforest once more.