Help unlock a Secret Forest

Your support today will help raise £500,000 to cover the cost of the remaining 174 hectares of Franchises Lodge – an area of over 1,000 acres of woodland, pasture, scrub and heath in the New Forest. With your support, we can safeguard the future of a unique area where wildlife treasures like threatened lesser-spotted woodpeckers and purple emperor butterflies make their home. 

Pristine ancient woodland is incredibly scarce, so this is an opportunity we can’t miss.  Once, the UK was covered in woodland like this. Now it covers only 1.2% of the UK. Old woods are good woods for nature, because they provide such a rich habitat.

Sadly, hawfinches are in sharp decline. Along with other woodland species they make up one -third of the “Red-List” of birds of conservation concern, so it’s vital to protect this habitat. We expect to find rare spotted flycatchers and wood warblers here, plus firecrests and redstarts.

We know Franchises Lodge could hold exciting wildlife treasures. But we don’t know exactly what we’ll find, until your gifts give us the opportunity to explore. The New Forest is already home to thousands of species of fungi, lichens, and beetles including the spectacular stag beetle. With 13 bat species already found in New Forest, your gift will help keep them safe.

With carefully managed grazing, New Forest ponies could clear scrub and help open heathland regenerate. Over thousands of years they helped create the New Forest landscape. Your support today will support this traditional way of managing the land.

This secret forest is the missing link that will connect two internationally important sites for nature in the New Forest; creating a vital bridge of nature rich land and a bigger, better home for wildlife.