CHILDREN from Princetown Primary School sowed seed for a new wildflower meadow last Thursday to mark the successful repair of the collapsed wall outside Dartmoor Prison.

The wall collapsed four years ago and since then locals have been subjected to legendary hold ups at the traffic lights on what is the main road into Princetown from Tavistock. Now, though, the wall has been successfully repaired and contractors came along on Thursdsay last week to see their handiwork and meet children sowing a wildflower meadow on the bank behind the wall.

They were working with Ellie Baker, conservation officer at Shallowford Farm in Widecombe-in-the-Moor and her colleague David Onah. The farm offers holidays to children from disadvantaged backgrounds from other parts of the country, but thanks to some lottery funding is now working with children closer to home. They brought along buckets of wildflower seed harvested from hay meadows at Postrbridge, as part of the Green Recovery Challenge Fund project in partnership with the Dartmoor Hill Farm Project and Butterfly Conservation.

Ellie said: ‘This is a partnership betwen the Dartmoor National Park Authority and we are involved because we had funding this year to do some hay meadow restoration. That is where this seed has come from, it is local seed from Postbridge. We are trying to restore as much grassland as we possibly can.’

Emma Byrom, head of school at Princetown Primary School, came along with the children.She said: ‘What is really good is we are learning about biodiversity and climate change at school at the moment. We want to increase biodiversity in the school grounds and in Princetown so this is a massive help.’

Rob Walsh, from Dartmoor Prison, said: ‘We had this bank area behind the wall and rather than just leaving it to become a boggy mess we have got the children around to sow wildflower seed along the whole length of the wall to create a wildflower habitat.’

The wildflower meadow would be there for the children to enjoy for years to come ‘as they are walking past’ he added. Speaking about the wall, he said the job had been a complex one as it was decided in the end to replace all 240-metres of it. ‘We had to engage with the local authority and English Heritage. It was complex, we couldn’t just knock it down and rebuild it. it was quite a meticulous process. Obviously for residents, the traffic management has been there for some time amd there have been some frustrations at times, so we needed to have it back open.’