Aston Rowant Nature Reserve is located on the western escarpment of the Chiltern Hills near Stokenchurch on the Oxfordshire - Buckinghamshire border in the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty[1] The reserve is in several sections, divided by the M40 motorway in the Aston Rowant Cutting. Most of the reserve is in the parishes of Aston Rowant and Lewknor in Oxfordshire; smaller sections are in the parish of Stokenchurch in Buckinghamshire.
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The Aston Rowant reserve is managed by Natural England assisted by the Oxford Conservation Volunteers It offers a nationally important habitat of Chalk grassland and Juniper Scrub with significant areas of hanging Beechwood at Aston Rowant Wood
Aston Rowant is especially noted in Spring and Summer for the wildflowers and orchids associated with close-cropped chalk grassland, managed by careful grazing regimes. Orchid species recorded include Common spotted orchid, Fragrant Orchid, Pyramidal Orchid, Bee Orchid, Frog Orchid, Early Purple Orchid and Greater Butterfly Orchid [2]
This habitat is particularly attractive to many species of butterflies such as the Silver-spotted Skipper, the Dark Green Fritillary and the Chalkhill Blue[3] Over 30 species of butterfies have been recorded on the reserve
Muntjac and Roe Deer are found on the Reserve, as are the Brown Hare. Aston Rowant is also an important conservation site for the endangered Hazel Dormouse
Aston Rowant[4] and Aston Rowant Wood[5] are both listed as SSSIs.
In 1989, the Aston Rowant NNR became one of the initial four sites selected by the RSPB and Natural England for the reintroduction to England of the Red Kite, which had become extinct in England and Scotland due to persecution since the early 1900s, and reduced to a residual population of a few dozen pairs in central Wales. Initially birds were brought in from Spain but the reintroduction programme based in the Chilterns was so successful that the local population has now self-generated to a level of approximately 200 pairs [6] and chicks are now taken from the Chilterns population for reintroduction projects elsewhere in the UK [7]
Anyone travelling West from London to Oxford on the M40 motorway passes through the middle of the Aston Rowant NNR, where a deep cutting through the Chiltern Hills - the Stokenchurch Gap - drops the motorway down onto the Oxfordshire plain between Junction 5 Stokenchurch and junction 6 Watlington. This section of the "Midlands Link" motorway opened in 1974 after a protracted and bitter Public Enquiry. In may ways this project helped motivate and activate the conservation groups in the UK against further infrastructure projects that would destroy valuable and protected natural habitats. The rejection of the arguments of the conservation lobby, and the very-visible damage done to the Aston Rowant NNR following the decision to cut the Chiltern escarpment through the middle of a supposedly protected National Nature Reserve was in many ways responsible for the massive and organised subsequent protests and occupations that accompanied the construction of the M3 Motorway through Twyford Down near Winchester in the 1980s, where again a decision was taken to make a deep cutting through a valuable chalk grassland environment which could have been protected by tunnelling.[8]