Leading developments in Geoconservation

From its inception in the mid-1990s, the Herefordshire and Worcestershire Earth Heritage Trust has been active in national developments to document, preserve and educate the public about our geological heritage. The Trust arose out of an initiative to designate and protect locally important geological sites and was one of the founder RIGS groups carrying out this work at a county level.  RIGS stands for Regionally Important Geological Sites, what we now call Local Geological Sites. For a period of 10-15 years many public bodies and charities were able to fund work on geoconservation and the Trust was at the forefront of new developments including the development of Geodiversity Action Plans and the development of the Geopark Way. A link to details of these older projects is further down this page.

Since the financial crash of 2008, funding has been much harder to find, but the Trust has been successful in being funded for a series of projects by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, supplemented by funds from local charities.  On this page, we provide  links to web pages and websites on the most substantial of these: the Community Earth Heritage Site Champions (2008-2011), 1000 Years of Building with Stone (2012-2016), Voyages in Deep Time (2015-2018) and Conserving Herefordshire’s Ice Age Ponds (2019-2022).  Each of these has enabled us to engage consultants as project manager and/or project officers. At any one time, a number of other smaller initiatives, often with external funding, have also been in progress.