Scrubland turned into a haven for wildlife

CITY COUPLE INSPIRING OTHERS TO HELP RESTORE NATURE

- By LAURA JOINT

ELEVEN years after buying a site of neglected woodland in Plymouth, city couple Sid and Sam Remmer are reporting the return of an array of wildlife - and say more will follow, as they continue their "lifetime's work".

Sid and Sam had been searching for years for a little bit of land where they could create a haven of peace but had all-but given up hope of ever finding it in the UK. They'd even started to look abroad, when, quite unexpectedly, a site came up for auction that was right on their doorstep.

"It was basically a scabby hill that was overgrown and had been used as a dumping ground," said Sid, "but it was 10 acres of mixed woodland where you wouldn't expect it, in the middle of the city."

The site described at the auction as 'land to the east of Grantley Gardens' was being sold in 2014 by a development company after planning permission for homes there had been refused. "We went along to the auction really wanting to buy it and expecting to pay three times as much as we did," said Sid. "There was some mistrust of us at first, because it's rare for people to have somewhere like this and not want to profit from it. But we don't have children; the woods are our children. For us, it was genuinely about doing something nice."

The purchase made national headlines at the time not because this was a rare example of someone rescuing a local woodland from neglect, but because of Sid and Sam's stories:... Sid, whose background is in science, did well in the early days of Bitcoin and Sam teaches pole dancing at her gym in the city.

Move forward 11 years, and the story really is all about how, with the help of volunteers, they've transformed a rubbish-strewn city centre site into a biodiversity-rich area of protected trees, which they've named Tulgey Woods Sanctuary after Lewis Carroll's 'Through the Looking Glass'.