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England has some tiny nature reserves: a single pond got into The Guiness
Book of Records as one of the world’s smallest. Others stretch for miles,
taking in heather moors, shingle banks, wetlands and close-cropped downlands.
Peter Marren’s England’s National Nature Reserves (Poyser, pp 271, £20)
is, surprisingly, the first book to examine them all in detail. Marren recounts
the history of struggle to convince authorities to set land aside to preserve
rare habitats. Some battles have been half won and half lost – one reserve
consisted of a small field of plants growing as a thin skin over rock. A
local quarry had rights to mine the rock so a bold experiment lifted the
entire reserve a few metres out of the way. As Marren says it set a dangerous
precedent: road builders would love to move the nature out of the way but
the solution was in this exceptional case the right one.