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Park & Wildlife

Abounding in nature

Not only is Helmingham Hall home to a wonderful diversity of flora, it’s a place where wildlife thrives. The Park at Helmingham Hall encloses 400 acres, where magnificent herds of deer roam free all year round, as they have done for hundreds of years. And plenty of other creatures arrive and depart with the changing seasons, making us one of the most diverse sites in the UK in terms of wildlife.

This is due to the way we manage the land at Helmingham, treating it with respect and great care to ensure it remains in prime condition for wildlife. It’s also somewhere resources exist in plentiful abundance, and the age and prime location of the site means it has been a safe harbour for migrating creatures for hundreds of years.

Historical setting

In the archives there are reports of the Mound being used by the Helmingham Volunteers to practise their musketry during the Napoleonic Wars, but the Monument itself was constructed in about 1860, repurposing the bricks of an ornamental seventeenth-century walled arboretum on the site, which had fallen into disrepair.

Constable Country

The famous landscape painter, John Constable, had a brother who was steward of the Tollemache woodlands, and he lived for some time at Helmingham Rectory, painting a number of versions of A Dell in Helmingham Park during his stay. The oak tree in that picture, with its singular curved trunk, still stands.

Ancient Trees

Some of the famous Helmingham oaks in the Park are estimated to be up to 900 years old, and many have immense girths, but the splendid oak avenue leading up the front drive was planted about 1680. This avenue and many trees in the Park suffered terribly in the great storm of 1987; a large replanting scheme is being carried out so that future generations will see little change.

A home for nature

As you may expect from the abundance of blooms across the estate, nectar is available in profusion. There is also cool, clean water and sufficient shelter for any discerning wildlife in a range of habitats. Surrounded by grazed, grassland pasture, it has become a permanent ‘island’ home for many animals, and an essential port of call for more mobile and migratory species.

Common and garden

We are blessed with the usual familiar garden wildlife: hedgehogs, slow worms, common frogs and toads, blue tits, great tits and long-tailed tits, chaffinches and goldfinches, house martins, swallows, robins, blackbirds, thrushes and wrens, honey and bumble bees, red admiral, peacock and tortoiseshell butterflies, shield bugs, grasshoppers and dragonflies.

All creatures great and small

It’s also possible to spot rare and interesting species such as large skipper, blue, brimstone and speckled wood butterflies, willow emerald damselflies, adonis, cream spotted and eyed ladybirds, Roesel’s bush-crickets, ruby-tailed and spider-hunting wasps, tree bumble bees, water scorpions, kingfishers, tufted, mandarin and shelducks, barn and little owls, turtle doves, spotted flycatchers and buzzards, the occasional otter, weasels and pygmy shrews! A recent bat survey recorded seven species, and the long-eared bat, hard to pick up on detectors, has also been observed flitting about in our grounds.

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