HOLLINS FARM

ENNERDALE

THE FARM

ENVIRONMENTAL FEATURES

VISITORS

ENVIRONMENTAL FEATURES

The fell land rises to over 2,800 feet in the Ennerdale fells and on Kinniside Common and includes an area of SSSI designated for its important upland montane vegetation.

GEOLOGY

The farm sits on the Borrowdale Volcanic group with the local stone being granite and slate.

FAUNA

The farm has foxes, badgers, hares, occasional deer, buzzards, peregrine falcons, merlin, otters and a healthy aquatic population in Croasdale Beck and the River Calder.

FLORA

The farm owns fell grazings in Ennerdale on part of the Ennerdale fell SSSI. This has typical heath and bog vegetation of heather, cross-leaved heath, bilberry, crowberry and cowberry. The vegetation also includes bryophytes, lichens and sphagnum moss. There are rare arctic-alpine plants in gills and on inaccessible crags and screes.

HEDGEROWS

There are few hedgerows on the farm with field boundaries consisting largely of turf stone banks known as dyke kests.

ARCHAEOLOGY

Ennerdale is of exceptional archaelogical importance with farming having taken place since the bronze age and a rich heritage of iron ore and copper mining and processing.

Adjacent to the farm and originally part of it is a shieling settlement at Smithy Beck where there is also the survival of a medieval iron-working landscape including an ancient bloomery. This is an iron making process involving a simple furnace in which a mixture of iron ore and charcoal is burnt with the help of air from hand worked bellows.

More information about the rich archaelogical heritage of Ennerdale can be found at www.wildennerdale.co.uk in a report titled the "West Cumbria Historic Landscape survey".

DRY STONE WALLS

There are around 2Km of dry stone wall on the farm's land at Kinniside.

VERNACULAR BUILDINGS & FEATURES

The farmhouse dates from 1717 and records indicate an inhabitation on the site from at least the early 16th century. There is a packhorse bridge over the River Calder.