The first step towards creating a Celtic rainforest – a now extremely rare habitat that once covered large swathes of the west coast of Britain – has been completed in Devon.

More than 2,500 native trees have been planted so far this winter at Devon Wildlife Trust’s Bowden Pillars site, above the Dart valley and close to the green-minded market town of Totnes.

In decades to come, these trees – oak, rowan, alder, hazel, birch, willow and holly – will form a temperate rainforest, sometimes known as a Celtic or Atlantic rainforest.