From the archive
30 Sep 2026
This autumn, staff and volunteers at Kent Wildlife Trust took down the fence around Ham Fen Nature Reserve and let the beavers out. The animals have lived inside an enclosure on the reserve since 2003; from now on they can range beyond it, damming, digging and coppicing across the wider East Kent landscape under a wild licence. It is a small physical act - a barrier removed by hand - that closes a project older than some of the people unbolting it.
The whole thing started with an access problem. Ham Fen is one of Kent's last scraps of fenland, and the wet, soft ground made conventional restoration machinery difficult and expensive to use in such conditions. In 2000 the Trust, working with the Wildwood Trust, began exploring whether beavers could do the job instead, and in 2003 a colony of Eurasian beavers was released into the enclosure - the first beaver reintroduction ever attempted in Britain.
Inside the fence, the beavers did what was asked of them. Their dams raised water levels and helped restore areas of peat fen; their felling and coppicing opened up a shifting patchwork of open water, wetland, scrub and young woodland, and fenland wildlife moved in. John Wilson, the Trust's East Coast Warden, who has watched the project for years, called the results "remarkable". The enclosure became one of the key pieces of evidence that beavers could be tolerated, and useful, in an English landscape.
What changed is the paperwork, not the animals. In February 2025 the government began allowing licensed releases into the wild, including letting established enclosure populations transition to free-living ones where a management plan exists. Ham Fen's colony qualified. The hope is that free movement will bring better genetic mixing and a more resilient population across the catchment - the River Stour, close by, already holds England's largest wild beaver population.
The Trust is not romantic about what happens next. A partnership with Beaver Trust, South East Rivers Trust, a local farmer cluster and Natural England is working with more than 250 landowners and farmers on the practical frictions of living alongside beavers, building on an advisory group running since 2019. Beavers were hunted out of Britain in the sixteenth century; getting them back has taken twenty-six years and counting, most of it spent on people rather than animals.
If beavers turn up on land you manage in the Stour catchment, the route already exists: the East Kent Beaver Advisory Group has been bringing conservationists, farmers, government and land managers together since 2019, and the new partnership is working with more than 250 landowners on the practical frictions of coexistence. Joining the table costs time rather than money - the advice and management tools follow from showing up.
Beaver Trust · Kent Wildlife Trust · Read the source