Tens of thousands of Christmas trees are buried on a beach near Blackpool.
Some stick out of the sand in plain sight, others are buried underneath metres of sand dunes - exactly where they’re supposed to be.
Every February for two days, hundreds of locals descend on the beach wielding spades. They spend hours digging trenches in the sand and then fill them with old Christmas trees, buried up to their bottom branches. The next time the wind blows, the trees will catch grains of sand in their branches and begin to rebuild Lancashire’s last remaining dunes.
It takes six months to a year to build new dunes with this method, a process that can take hundreds of years in nature. The annual Christmas tree burial has completely changed the landscape along the beach - what was once flat is now hilly, covered in grasses and home to around 500 sand lizards.
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Development, coastal erosion and people using the sand in industry have all forced the dunes into retreat. Fylde Council now bears the responsibility of having Lancashire’s only remaining sand dunes, and ranger Andy Singleton Mills looks after them. He says the sand dunes are crucial for Fylde.
“They’re a brilliant soft sea defence, they protect all the houses of St Annes and Lytham further down the coast. And they’re also a rich cultural feature - they’ve been here for hundreds of years and they protect so much wildlife.”
They did this here for a couple of years but had to stop as it was too successful and the dunes rather took over.
Good to see it’s working there, hopefully it will be useful elsewhere. And they have sand lizards. I definitely want some of them down here as we’re a little wildlife poor, although we have had some natterjack toads moved down to us (as they have an abundance further up the coast as they’ll spawn in puddles in car parks and have to be scooped up before the puddle dries out.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
They spend hours digging trenches in the sand and then fill them with old Christmas trees, buried up to their bottom branches.
The next time the wind blows, the trees will catch grains of sand in their branches and begin to rebuild Lancashire’s last remaining dunes.
The annual Christmas tree burial has completely changed the landscape along the beach - what was once flat is now hilly, covered in grasses and home to around 500 sand lizards.
Fylde Council now bears the responsibility of having Lancashire’s only remaining sand dunes, and ranger Andy Singleton Mills looks after them.
"They’re a brilliant soft sea defence, they protect all the houses of St Annes and Lytham further down the coast.
"We’ve put in lots of rows of Christmas trees that are now buried and will have all decomposed - they’re now part of the sand dune system.
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