Dormice waking from hibernation 'to discover a bigger, better world'

The dormice of Wensleydale will have a nice surprise as they awaken from hibernation this year, thanks to a major conservation effort over the past few months. Annunciata Elwes explains.

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(Image credit: Wild Dales Photography - Simon Phillpotts / Alamy)
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Two fledgling populations of native endangered dormice in Wensleydale should now be waking from their winter slumber to discover a bigger, wider world, as local landowners and farmers have completed a six-mile corridor of woodland and hedgerow either side of Freeholders’ Wood at Aysgarth Falls.

The three-year Wensleydale Dormouse Project, which is funded by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES), Woodland Trust, Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority and Millennium Trust, among others, is part of the PTES’s National Dormouse Monitoring Programme. Giving the populations room to roam is vital, as dormice are almost entirely arboreal and need to be able to walk along branches, hopping from one tree or bush to another.

‘They do best in a shrub environment. They need hawthorn, blackthorn, spindle, hazel — especially hazel — bird cherry and dog rose,’ explains Phill Hibbs, trees and woodlands officer for the National Park Authority.

‘Small woodlands are stepping stones for the dormice as they go down the dale.’

In the past 100 years, dormice have become extinct in 17 English counties and have declined countrywide by 51% since 2000, due to climate change and loss of woodland habitat. ‘Unless we do something, populations either become completely unviable or they are pretty much restricted to nature reserves,’ warns Ian White, PTES dormouse and training officer.

Since 1993, almost every year has seen a reintroduction and the two populations in Wensleydale that are benefiting from the new corridor were new in 2008 and 2016.

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Annunciata Elwes
Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.

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