Greenfield Valley Heritage Park and Basingwerk Abbey

Greenfield Valley Heritage Park is a country park covering 70 acres with woodlands, reservoirs, ancient monuments and industrial history close to Holywell.

A free visitor centre, which is also the entrance to a museum and farm, has information on woodland walks, educational activities, fishing and bird watching in the area.UK sights. A free guide/brochure is available from the visitor centre (open 1st April – 3rd November every day from 10am – 4.30pm). The Park and surrounding area is open all year round.

The park also contains the ruins of Basingwerk Abbey. It was founded in 1132 and was for 400 years home and workplace to the monks of the Cistercian Order until they were driven out by Henry VIII’s Dissolution Act in 1536. During the Middle Ages, a thriving economic and artistic community developed around the abbey and it became the home of many Welsh poets. The monks were the first to harness the power of the Holywell Stream, using its power to grind corn and treat the wool from their flocks of sheep.

Flint Castle

Flint Castle is a late thirteenth-century stone keep and enclosure castle built by Edward I.

Commanding the site at one corner of the rectangular inner ward, and isolated by its own ditch, is an unique cylindrical great tower. The other three corners of the inner ward have substantial round flanking towers, which projected into the Dee estuary. The large walled outer ward is unflanked with a large ditch in front and a revetted cross-ditch at the back, guarding the small inner gatehouse, all fed by the tidal waters of the River Dee.

Flint Castle is located in the town centre, off Castle Dyke Street.

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England’s nature reserves, national parks and protected areas are failing in four out of five key quality benchmarks, according to a major year-long government-sponsored review.

The report by leading wildlife experts warns that England’s wildlife protection areas are not effective enough at preserving species due to poor management, small size, ease of reach by the wider public (especially in urban areas) and lack of inter-connections between wild areas. England’s attractions.The only measure met by the sites is their ability to support the full-range of England’s wildlife and habitats.
To help improve the quality of England’s wild areas for conservation and stem the loss of two species per year to extinction, the authors recommend the creation of 12 huge “ecological restoration zones” to improve key habitats and foster better connections between them. Sir John Lawton, who led the review, said between £0.6bn and £1.1bn is needed to help rebuild nature in England.

“Before the report, we knew that the state of our wildlife network was not great – butterflies, for example, are declining inside our protected areas as fast as they are outside,” said Lawton. “But the situation today would have been a lot worse without the existing protection network.”
The report, which was commissioned by the then environment secretary Hilary Benn last September, says the “serious short-comings” on the four criteria demonstrate that England lacks a “coherent and resilient ecological network” for its animals and plants.

England has a network of thousands of formally-protected wildlife sites that make up around 7% of its land and are crucial habitats for the country’s 55,000 animal and plant species. A much larger area of land comes under national parks or other designations but these offer much lower protection for wildlife. Just 6.1% of England’s total land is given over to 3,174 sites that provide the strongest protection – sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) – compared with the 10% recommended by the UN.

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