Impact story: The Penpont Project

Set in 2000 hectares of an upland estate, a patchwork of farmland, waterways and managed land by the River Usk in Bannau Brycheiniog (the Brecon Beacons), the Penpont Project is the UK’s biggest intergenerational nature restoration initiative. The vision behind it is rooted in partnership. Reaching beyond ecological restoration, it aims to achieve ​‘bio-cultural restoration’, in which people and land recover diversity and resilience in unison. With a strong focus on bringing people of all ages together, it seeks to empower young people to step into leadership of this natural recovery.

The project draws together people living and working on Penpont land and the young people who will inherit the region’s landscapes to forge and implement a plan for its future. It is a partnership between charity partner Action for Conservation (AFC), the Penpont Estate, local farmers, scientists, community members and a Youth Leadership Group of young people aged 13 – 18. The future Penpont landscape will be shaped by a mosaic of rewilding and regenerative agriculture approaches, supporting diversified agricultural livelihoods and welcoming visitors to connect with and learn about nature and local traditions.

In 2023, the Penpont Project added a layer to its educational offering in the form of a four-month Youth Ranger Programme, seedfunded by Rewilding Britain’s Rewilding Innovation Fund. Providing two local young people with in-depth experience of land work, the programme offers practical first steps towards working in conservation, rewilding or other environmental and community work that might otherwise feel unattainable. Its inspiration was both the Penpont Project team’s belief that the longer young people spend in nature the more transformational their experience, and the challenges local young people face in finding work in rural areas. 

One of the first pair of Youth Rangers, Ella Davies, has returned to Penpont in a new role as Learning and Engagement Coordinator with AFC. We spoke to Ella to learn what rangership has meant to her and to Penpont.

What’s special about the Penpont Project?

Penpont is the biggest intergenerational conservation project of its kind, and is partly youth led. It’s landowners, young people, tenant farmers and the community coming together to work out a conservation strategy for the land. Being so community and youth driven is really quite unusual for conservation programmes. When I came to Penpont it was such a welcoming atmosphere. As a young person on the project, that youth-led approach enables you to foster a deeper appreciation for and connection to the land.

The Youth Leadership Group brings young people in from the surrounding area. It’s an incredible way of taking people who wouldn’t normally have access to the land and outdoors and giving them a sense of agency and empowerment to be able to work on the land. They’ve been part of developing Penpont since 2019 with about four residential visits per year, each time doing a series of activities in which everyone gets really involved.

How did you come to the Youth Ranger Programme?

I grew up in the area, so I had a close connection to the Brecon Beacons [Bannau Brycheiniog]. I always knew I wanted to work with people and I love being outdoors.

My background was in fine art but I wanted to take my experience to running workshops and making art outside the studio. The Ranger Programme offered the opportunity to do 50% land-based work and 50% community engagement and outreach work, and that really suited the angle I was coming from — getting people to engage with the environment through artistic means.

What did you do as a Ranger?

There’s plenty of conservation work like building leaky dams [placing logs and branches across waterways to reduce flooding and filter debris while allowing water to flow at normal levels] or planting trees. We also measured how what’s been done on previous Youth Leadership Group residentials had affected the landscape, including speaking with landowners, tenant farmers and project partners, and plotting everything onto a map to see what had changed.

We ran community action days, doing activities such as seed processing and tree planting. One of my favourites was running a land art session where we collected loads of beautifully coloured autumn leaves and created a giant leaf mandala on the floor, which we then captured footage of with a drone. It was an amazing day where everybody of all ages could get involved in making this giant land art piece. That felt quite symbolic of what Penpont tries to achieve in its intergenerational awareness and involvement. 

Rangers also work towards a final personal project. Mine was creating a folklore tree trail for visitors, inspired by a day learning bushcraft that had made us feel totally immersed in that environment — I remember almost not wanting to go back into the normal world again. I made this little book of folklore tree stories and a map to follow so you could tell the stories as you walked around. 

What did you learn and what are you most proud of? 

It was a completely invaluable experience for me. It was genuinely life changing and enabled me to find a voice I didn’t know I had, and gave me that step up into the world of conservation.

I was leaning towards the community engagement and outreach aspect, wanting to help people to enjoy the environment in different ways. But I equally enjoyed the land-based work, learning physical skills like tree planting, coppicing and fence building. I got loads of qualifications, such as outdoor first aid, chainsaw, quad bike, all-terrain vehicle, an amazing array of transferrable skills. People skills are also a huge part of it — being able to hold and run sessions and engage lots of different people.

I was quite shy when I started the programme and I’m proud of being supported to run activities with big groups. That wasn’t something that felt achievable to me when I first started, I was massively out of my comfort zone. Now I can’t imagine it being a different way. Being able to find my voice and encourage other people to engage in the environment, and using creative and artistic ability to do that, was brilliant. 

How does the Ranger Programme benefit participants?

It’s a really great stepping stone for young people wanting to get into conservation who perhaps don’t have the access or the background, or just don’t know how to. It’s an amazing opportunity to develop skills that you can take both into everyday life and into conservation. 

Rangers are paid the national living wage, which is great because a lot of young people need paid work, especially in mid Wales.

I’ve felt really cherished as a part of the project, like we became integral to running it. Being given responsibility, it just felt like a completely welcoming but also empowering dynamic within the team. It was really inspiring to be part of a core community all with different skills to offer.

What do Rangers bring to Penpont?

What it specifically brings is the amount of community engagement work we were doing and physical conservation to the land. Over the course of the rangership we developed and put in place a lot of new things and strategies, conservation-wise, that are now being developed and will grow into the future. 

It’s important to bring in young people because they’re continually inspired by everybody else working on the project, and in turn they want to nurture and care for the land which they feel they’ve contributed towards. I think that’s what the project does uniquely.

It’s a really exciting new energy brought to the place. The rangers so far all have different backgrounds, different skills they can bring and fresh new perspectives.

What’s next for you, Penpont and the Youth Ranger Programme?

I’m about to start working with AFC as Penpont’s Learning and Engagement Coordinator. I’ll be doing a lot more outreach to schools and youth groups around the Brecon-Abergavenny area. My role is to focus on bringing in young local people who don’t know about the project or have never visited and on continually growing awareness of what Penpont hopes to achieve. 

We’ll be hosting more residentials doing things like leaky damming, mammal surveys and lots more tree planting. We’ve developed a new woodland education space called Camp Aelwyd (the Welsh word for ​‘hearth’) [supported by Rewilding Britain’s Rewilding Innovation Fund in 2025], which means we can hold residentials fully outside so everyone gets really involved with camp life. We can run all the same activities but also be coexisting and working together. 

I hope more rewilding projects can involve the voices of younger people, listen to what they want for the land and give them an opportunity to be able to care deeply for and connect with the land they feel a sense of custodianship towards. Ultimately, that’s the future.