At Holnicote Estate in Exmoor National Park, the National Trust is showing what practical woodland recovery looks like when public access, wildlife and long-term tree health all have to work together. The estate covers 5,059 hectares in West Somerset, much of it open under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, with 150 miles of footpaths and bridleways crossing moorland, coast and woods. That scale matters. Holnicote includes Horner Wood National Nature Reserve, a Site of Special Scientific Interest with 351.8 hectares of ancient oak woodland, so even small shifts in browsing or bark damage can have lasting effects on habitat restoration.

Grey squirrels are currently the sharpest pressure on those woods. The National Trust says they strip bark from both young and mature trees, especially high in the canopy, and in some cases remove 60 to 70 per cent of it. Trees weakened in that way are more likely to suffer in high winds, turning a pest problem into a wider woodland resilience problem. The return of pine martens has made the response more complicated, but also more promising. Once pine martens were confirmed on the estate, lethal traps for grey squirrels were no longer permitted because of the risk to the protected predators. That means every next step has to protect recovering native species as well as trees.

On paper, live trapping looks like a gentler substitute. On the ground, it is hard to make it work at Holnicote’s scale. The estate says an effective effort would need trapping lines of 40 to 50 individual traps, checked at least three or four times a day for a month before any clear impact was visible. Instead, Holnicote has joined forces with neighbouring landowners through a wider Exmoor grey squirrel control effort and is building a syndicate of trained volunteers using low-powered air rifles. At fixed bait stations, one trained volunteer removed about 150 grey squirrels between October 2024 and June 2025 from an area that had been taking heavy damage. It is targeted work rather than blanket culling, aimed at keeping bark-stripping pressure down where trees are most exposed.

Because these woods are open to the public, the safety case is as important as the ecological one. Risk assessments are used to place bait stations well away from public paths, and the steep valley side is used as a natural backstop. The estate says a 16.27 joule air rifle presents a low risk in that fixed setup, which is a reminder that access and active conservation do not have to be in conflict when sites are carefully designed. The estate is also tracking natural predators already doing some of the work. Pine martens and Eurasian goshawks both prey on grey squirrels, and the case study notes that after the June 2025 reporting period there were plans to release another 10 pine martens into Exmoor National Park within the following year as part of a broader reintroduction scheme.

Deer management follows the same practical logic. Fencing is a common answer for young woodland, yet Holnicote decided against wrapping large areas in wire after weighing the trade-offs. Fences can protect one block of trees in the short term, but they may simply push browsing pressure into the next block, while also bringing years of maintenance and a clear need for removal within a decade. Cost also changed the calculation. The National Trust found that fencing the 17-hectare Riverlands Wood at Porlock Vale against deer would have cost roughly the same as employing a full-time Wildlife Manager for a year, including the initial equipment bill. Government grants therefore went into a more flexible mix of targeted deer and squirrel control, alongside overplanting of some tree species to cut dependence on guards and fencing altogether.

The main deer issue is not always the animal visitors notice first. Red deer are part of the area’s tourism appeal, but the estate says roe deer are the bigger threat to young trees and coppice regrowth, especially in places where Eurasian beavers are active. To blunt that pressure, staff are applying Trico®, a deer repellent made from emulsified sheep fat, in Riverlands Wood where fencing and guards are both costly and awkward to use. Every tree is sprayed by hand twice a year, once in early spring and again in autumn. Early results suggest the method has worked well, bringing roe deer browsing damage to below 20 per cent within the first year. The Trust is careful not to overstate the result, noting that deliberate overstocking of trees may also be helping, and plans to use Forest Research’s nearest neighbour technique on new planting to measure what is driving the improvement.

Holnicote is also reshaping woodland edges so deer have somewhere else to feed. Glades and rides with highly palatable plants are being maintained along the margins of woods to provide alternative browsing areas. These features once made up only a small share of the site, but they are now built into plans from the start, and the Trust says their biodiversity value has increased as a result. Selective lethal control remains part of the picture, with deer numbers kept at what the estate describes as a healthy and sustainable level of around 8 deer per square kilometre. The wider lesson is not that one tool has won. It is that tree species choice, habitat design, non-lethal methods and carefully limited culling work best when they are treated as one clear plan for healthier woods that people can still enjoy.