Grey seals flourish again in British coastal waters

Grey seals at Horsey Gap in Norfolk

(Image credit: Umdash9/Alamy Stock Photo)

published 2 February 2023

A hundred years after hunting by fishermen drove their numbers down to as low as 500, grey seals are once again flourishing in British coastal waters. In a single colony on the Norfolk coast, nearly 4,000 pups were born in this winter’s breeding season, according to local conservationists – more than double the number in the winter of 2019-2020, when the last count was done on the five-mile stretch between Waxham and Winterton, and up from about 100 two decades ago. In total in the UK, there are believed to be about 120,000 grey seals – which amounts to about 40% of the global population.

Ancient forest saved by residents

A surviving fragment of an ancient forest in southeast London has been saved by the local community. The three-acre Gorne Wood in Brockley was once part of the Great North Wood that stretched for miles between the Thames and Croydon. It was made a public park 100 years ago, and used by Scouts, until it was sold in the 1980s. Lately, it had been mainly used by fly-tippers. Now, however, residents have raised more than £100,000 to acquire the site and restore the wood.

A cyclist who set himself the challenge of riding across every one of Ordnance Survey’s maps of Great Britain has finally completed the odyssey. Mark Wedgwood, 55, came up with the idea after he lost his job in the pandemic, and he was looking for a new adventure. It involved cycling through each of the Landranger series’ 204 maps in numerical order, a 7,000-mile journey that necessitated 26 coast to coast trips. It took him six months. “I’ve never felt better,” he told The Guardian. “It’s done me an enormous amount of good in every sense.”