Restore bought the 7,500-acre Emblehope Moor in Northumberland for £8.5m to run a 20-year nature restoration programme that aims to bring back golden eagles, curlews, black grouse and beavers and restore peatland, streams and native habitats. The project still needs to raise £4m to fund works and will repay the £4.5m Triodos Bank loan that enabled the purchase; Restore says investors will receive financial returns, roughly a two-times return, and then the site will be transferred into local community or charitable ownership. Immediate tasks include removing non-native Sitka spruce and rewetting drained peat; modelling suggests restored peat could hold about 100,000 cubic metres of extra water, roughly 40 Olympic swimming pools. Emblehope is an SSSI with existing raptors including merlin and prospecting golden eagles, plus trout, salmon, red squirrels and pine martens in the area. Founder Benedict Macdonald framed the plan as a mixed capitalist and community model intended as a national uplands example, while environmentalist Ben Goldsmith called the wider Northumberland mosaic Britain’s Yellowstone. Nearby conservation efforts include the Wildlife Trusts’ nearly complete £30m appeal for the Rothbury estate, underscoring a regional push toward landscape-scale rewilding.
