About the Scheme Area

What Does the Scheme Involve? | Who is Involved?

The Habitats & Hillforts Landscape Partnership Scheme is focused on the chain of historically important hill top Iron Age forts that lines Cheshire's Sandstone Ridge

The Habitats and Hillforts Landscape Partnership Scheme area showing the scheduled hillforts and wider management zones. The blue line is the boundary of the Sandstone Ridge ECOnet Partnership. Click on a management zone on the map to take you to information about that area.


Download a copy of the scheme leaflet for more information.

Scheme area map

 

More information about the Hillfort Scheme Areas:

The Sandstone Ridge is a living landscape and a valued economic, social and heritage asset to the 34,000 people who live and work in the area and the many hundreds of thousands who visit it for rest and recreation each year. 

Flanked by glacial sands and gravels, the Ridge has a strong cultural and natural character of which its key characteristics are:

  • The sandstone ridge itself with outcrops and upstanding bluffs of over 100m, forming a distinctive landmark and providing spectacular long distance views across Cheshire and beyond towards Wales, the Peak District and Shropshire
  • High density woodland compared with the rest of Cheshire comprising ancient woodland and post medieval conifer plantations
  • The largest areas of surviving lowland heath in Cheshire
  • Low density dispersed farms
  • Sandstone buildings, boundary walls and sunken lanes
  • 6 iron age hillforts with surviving earthworks
  • Historic halls at Utkinton and Peckforton Castle
  • Industrial archaeological remains of sandstone quarries and copper mines in particular

The Scheme area is essentially rural in character, and in fact has quite a remote and hidden feel, especially in the south.  There are, however, significant urban populations nearby and their many schools and educational establishments that use the area for recreation and could be encouraged to appreciate it more (over 400,000 people live within 30 minutes drive of the Sandstone Ridge).  An estimated 1.4 million walking trips are made along its length, utilising the 473 kilometres of rights of way which include the Sandstone Trail long distance footpath.  The area also includes Delamere Forest, Cheshire’s prime countryside recreational destination.