Evening nature walk & campfire gathering at Dean Common

Join our Countryside and Reserves manager Toby Swift for an evening walk at Dean Common, one of our more remote and very rural ‘hidden gems’, and see how we’ve helped nature reclaim this old sand quarry.

Dean Common was our very first nature reserve, the result of a collaboration with our partners at Oxfordshire District Council back in 1997. Like many of the best nature reserves in the modern landscape, Dean Common is an exhausted quarry. After sand extraction ended at the site, the quarry was partially restored in some areas with appropriate scrub and tree planting and left to rewild through natural succession in others. The low nutrient subsoil left behind in disused quarries results in interesting and specialist plants and invertebrates, particularly in the early stages of colonisation and successional change.

Today, nearly 25 years on, the nature reserve is a remote gem with a rich and maturing…