A group of volunteers aims to honour the 19th century nature poet John Clare with a project to reclaim habitats and open up corridors of land to encourage wildlife. Clare grew up in Helpston, Cambridgeshire, which at the time was part of Northamptonshire, and wrote about the loss of the scenery he loved as a child.

The John Clare Countryside Project, led by the Langdyke Countryside Trust, wants to connect Peterborough to Stamford in Lincolnshire, through green corridors of farmland. Richard Astle, chair of the trust, said: "It would be great to create some of John Clare's lost habitats in his honour and in his memory."

The John Clare Countryside is an area of 30,000 acres (121 sq km) from Peterborough to the border with Lincolnshire. The project aims to bring back lost habitats, including wetlands and woodlands, and see farmland and nature thrive together. At one site near Peterborough, work has begun on a tree nursery and wildflower meadow.

Michael Horne, a volunteer with the Langdyke Countryside Trust, said the team had been creating "pockets" to find homes for native wildlife. "Nature is in a tough way at the moment, that's been going on for a long time now," he said. "If we can find opportunities where we turn the clock back a little bit and improve things for nature and people's enjoyment, that's really important."

When Clare was 16, enclosures legislation saw common land at Helpston fenced off with trees cut down and locals barred from access.

In his biography of Clare, Jonathan Bate notes that in “the years from 1809 to 1820, as Clare grew from adolescence to adulthood, Helpston and its neighbouring parishes were steadily enclosed … Fences, gates, and No Trespassing signs went up. Trees came down. Streams were stopped in their course so that the line of ditches could be made straight … For many villagers … Enclosure was … symbolic of the destruction of an ancient birthright based on co-operation and common rights. The chance of Clare’s time and place of birth gave him an exceptional insight into this changed world.” 

Clare has been described by the historian EP Thompson as a “poet of ecological protest”.

Richard Astle, who urged more volunteers to get involved in the project, said the aim was to see nature and farming "thrive" together. He hoped the work would honour John Clare as the country's greatest nature poet. "He wrote about a time of great change in the countryside, much as we are seeing at the moment," he said.

"He was very worried about the loss of people's access to the common land through enclosure. No longer could he walk across the countryside as he had before, and he saw nature in peril."

Background: Celebrating mature, mourning lost landscape