Brightling Environment Group
In February 2023, a group of local people came together to explore ways our local community could reduce carbon emissions, reverse biodiversity loss, and tackle the challenges of climate change. Since then, Brightling Environment Group has met regularly, and held a series of what we hope are informative and enjoyable events. The group is open to all: for details of all our events, to join our mailing list or to become a member, please contact brightlingenvironmentgroup@gmail.com
Most events will be promoted by email and in The Messenger and will be bookable on Eventbrite.
Events in 2026
Great Green Garden Party – 11-4pm Saturday 20 June
Brightling Environment Group’s main event of the summer is this month: 20th June, to be precise, when it will be holding its annual Great Green Garden Party. This year, the party has moved a mile or so along Brickyard Lane, to the beautiful gardens and woodland at Grade II-listed Brightling Place.
While last year’s event took gardening for wildlife as its theme, this year we are celebrating a different strand sustainability: soil and soil health. As well as offering a chance to explore a glorious and super-fertile garden – the fruit of decades of work, packed with unusual shrubs, trees and perennials, and with a productive orchard and vegetable patch – there will be lots of opportunities to learn about how to look after your soil and grow well in it, without damaging the environment.
Local community-interest company SoilCraft will be talking all things compost, demonstrating how to improve fertility by building levels of vital soil microfauna and flora, and offering free, under-the-microscope analysis to anyone who brings along a sample of their own soil or compost. BEG will have a stand devoted to plants that improve soil, and will be selling seed mixes suitable for adding fertility (and a spot of beauty) to our local gardens and veg patches. Along with tea and home-made cake, there will also be an area devoted to clay and what you can make with it, with stalls selling work by local artisan potters, and a chance to get your own hands dirty at a demonstration table. We’re looking forward to what will be an enjoyable and informative day – do come along!
Great Green Garden Party 2026: 20th June 2026, 10.30am-4.pm. Entry is free, but places are limited. To book a ticket and for full event details, please visit https://BEGgarden26.eventbrite.co.uk
ere will be craft stalls, a plant sale and cakes…of course.
Byways Walk and FIT count – Wednesday 8 July 6pm
No its not doing press ups on this 7.8km walk! We will start at the triangle (junction of Sheepshaw, Willingford and Observatory Lanes) and walk through woods towards Batemans and Bog Wood then back along the valley floor and return through fields and along a track. The Flower and Insect Timed Count (FIT) for the annual Pollinator Monitoring Scheme means we stop for 10 minutes to count insects in our own metre square patch. If possible the FIT app should be loaded onto your phone before the walk, although there will be paper and pens too. Drinks at the Swan afterwards is always a possiblity.
Please let me know if you are coming on this walk – cllr.katrina.blench@brightling-pc.gov.uk
Himalayan Balsam Bashing – Saturday 11 July from 9.30am…
Help needed please
Brightling has increasing areas of a potentially invasive plant growing along our riverbanks and roadside verges. It spreads quickly, particularly along water courses where its seeds float downstream, and can outcompete native plants both by colonising large areas of ground, and by diverting pollinators away from other plants that flower at the same time.
The plant is Himalayan Balsam (Impatiens glandulifolia) and on the morning of Saturday 11 July from 9.30am Jamie Smith, a local resident will lead a working party at Oxley’s Green to pull up as many balsam plants as possible. Being an annual, when balsam is uprooted that particular plant will die; pulling before the plants flower and have a chance to set seed is a great first step to controlling its spread. Balsam is shallow-rooted, so pulling is not too onerous, and refreshments will be provided.
We hope you can help us with this practical effort to support biodiversity in our area.
If you can help, even if it is just for an hour, please let us know, and bring your gardening gloves.
AGM September
Other likely events will be a Dusk Bat Walk and talk, the Dark Skies Festival in Oct/Nov, a Resilience of forests talk in the Autumn and work continues on our ongoing projects of Dark Skies accreditation, Dead hedge laying and Energy Use.
Past Events
2026
Medieval Meadows Walk
We spent a very special morning walking wildflower meadows which have been there for hundreds of years. This isolated group of fields surrounded by woodland in the Beech Estate was worked not very successfully or profitably by numerous tenant farmers over the years which seems to have been the saving of it. Harry Wills who led the walk told us that his Grandfather when he bought the estate after the second world war and was walking there was reminded of fields from his childhood so he decided it was worth keeping and that there should be limited farming in the area, mostly haymaking. Harry told us about the regime for maintaining the ancient meadows and increasing the wildflowers in other fields – if the soil is too fertile it will be a struggle to grow lots of wildflowers.
We hope we can arrange another walk there in the future.
Nightjar walks June
Two evening walks in Dallington Forest to hear these elusive birds. Places limited to 10 people.
Counting on Nature: How AI Can Track Wildlife Populations and Help Save Species
Thursday 26 February 7pm Brightling Village Hall
AI isn’t all chatbots and SkyNet. For an insight into how it could improve our environment and protect the natural world, join Brightling resident Olivier Wall for a fascinating talk about his work helping conservation charities use artificial intelligence to count, monitor and identify threatened species in our area.
2025
Great Green Garden Party, 8 June, 1-5pm
Linked to the Weald to Waves project, the afternoon in a Brightling garden looked at how to encourage wildlife and bio-diversity in our own backyards, and encouraged local people to join the Weald to Waves nature-friendly garden network. There was a pollinator-friendly plant sale, refreshments, garden tour, and information and resources from specialists such as the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, Sussex Bat Group, Butterfly Conservation.
Stall Saturday 19 July at Brightling Flower and Dog show
Warmer Brightling 2, Tuesday 14 October at 7:00 pm
Following on from our successful event in 2023 about using alternative energy sources to heat our homes we returned with a first-hand report from a Brightling resident on how an airsource heat pump actually performed in their old property across a whole year. Retrofit specialist Martin Turner from Energise Sussex Coast gave an overview of how to heat even old homes greener.
Dead Hedge Laying: a multi-year project
BEG is looking for local landowners and hedging contractors to attend our planned training week in September, with a view to a joining a multi-year, landscape-level project. There will also be an opportunity for those without hedges to get involved as volunteers, beginning this summer with citizen-science monitoring of birds and invertebrates in and around existing hedges.
Spring Dark Skies SkyWalk, 17 April 2025 7.30 pm Stargazing and Nature Walk with refreshments, at a private Brightling location.
Parish Annual Meeting 9 April – Dark Skies pledges requested following Dark Skies presentation by David Field.
2024
Dead-hedge Laying Workshop In November 2024, BEG teamed up with High Weald National Landscape to run a one-day workshop exploring a new technique, developed locally, for restoring overgrown hedges, and which creates both a dense, useful and attractive barrier, and a browse-proof habitat for birds and invertebrates. This workshop generated so much interest from landowners, farmers, hedging contractors and conservationists that the project is expanding this year (see more details below).
As part of the High Weald Wild About Dark Skies Festival in October and November, we held two events: In Darker Brightling our three expert speakers brilliantly convinced the 80+ audience members to reduce their external lighting, which adds to the pollution of the night sky, and disrupts the feeding and breeding patterns of bats, insects and other night-dwelling creatures. Doug Edworthy, Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, spoke of the beauty of our galaxy, Ryan Greaves from Sussex Bat Group made the case for bats, and bumblebee expert Professor Dave Goulson from the University of Sussex explained why protecting pollinators is vital for human survival. Sadly, the weather was too poor for Sussex Sidewalk Astronomers to show us the stars, but we are planning other events with them soon – watch this space.
Into the Night Later that week, 22 people met at a private Brightling location for an exciting, after-dark walk through woodland, hay meadow, orchards and other examples of typical local habitats. We discussed the stars visible at this time of year, identified local light-pollution hotspots, andlearnt about the nocturnal creatures who live in the dark – the world’s largest habitat.
At Brightling Flower and Dog show in July our Dark Sky stall saw more than 40 people pledge to reduce their external lighting and help tackle light pollution.
At a Moth Breakfast in July 2024, Caroline Moore revealed that in the three moth traps set in our area over two nights, 98 species were found. There were no rare species but we were able to see up close the beauty and variety of the moths, while realising at the same time how external lighting really disrupts their limited time to feed, mate and pollinate.
