How gifts in wills have made a difference: Smithills Estate

A third of all the work we do is made possible by gifts in wills. The Woodland Trust's Tracey Garrett explains how important this support is to help our work at places like Smithills Estate - a landscape we're restoring to benefit both wildlife and local people.

Video length: 00:02:12

My name's Tracey Garrett. I'm lucky enough to work here at the Smithills Estate for the Woodland Trust.

This site is just one in over a thousand woods that the Woodland Trust looks after.

People are valuing woods and trees more than ever before and kind gifts in wills help us to restore and protect this kind of landscape for future generations.

What we'll see in 20 years is all of the 120,000 trees that we've planted will have become woods. We'll see a lot more diversity because we've protected all these different habitats and we will see more wildlife than we've ever seen before and that will be in harmony with the visitors that come to site too. So we're protecting this site for years and years to come.

We've been planting trees for three or four years here on the Smithills Estate and we would not have been able to do that without community involvement. Thousands of local people have joined us to plant trees and to get involved.

Water is critically important on the Smithills Estate and historically always has been. The site was really popular with businesses such as brick and tile works, bleach works, where they were very keen to get the water running off the hillside into their factory environments. What this has led to is a degraded landscape so a lot of the work that we're doing here at Smithills is trying to keep the water on site for longer so that we can increase our diversity and encourage more wildlife back into the site.

Thank you so much to anyone who's considering leaving as a gift in their will. Your donation makes such a huge difference to sites like Smithills and to woods and trees across the UK.