A LANDSCAPE project skirting the edges of Burnley and Bacup - which has given fresh hope to the survival of a tiny songbird and opened up some of the South Pennines’ most remote locations - has won a national award.

Supporters of the Watershed Landscape initiative are celebrating again after scooping the communications and presentation prizes at the Landscape Institute Awards in London.

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Last year the same team was in Athens to hear that they were deserving of a laureate in the European Union’s Cultural Heritage competition.

Pam Warhurst, chairman of rural regeneration agency Pennine Prospects, paid tribute to the teamwork shown by environment officers on either side of the Lancashire and Yorkshire border. said:“The partnerships we have developed across the South Pennines are continuously working together to protect, enhance and promote the key features of this distinctive region.”

One of the key features of the project, worked on with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, was a hay meadow scheme to provide suitable foraging sites for the threatened twite.

The tiny creature, also known as the Pennine finch, only nests in a handful of locations, including the countryside around Cliviger and Hurstwood, and its habitats have been slowly decimated.

Next year the results of the Twite Recovery Project, two years on from the Watershed work, will be analysed by the RSPB to discover whether it has had a positive impact on the population figures.

Mountain bike tracks were also created by rangers on land owned by United Utilities at Hurstwood, as part of a wider effort to restore elements of Worsthorne Moor.

And a geology and heritage trail was established across Todmorden Moor, commemorating the area’s proud history of quarrying and stone-working, starting and ending at Tower Causeway.

The original £2.8million funding for the Watershed Landscape work was mainly provided by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the South Pennine Leader project and other partners, stretching through to West Yorkshire.

More than 30 British and international landscape initiatives battled it to secure recognition from the Landscape Institute, including rivals in Canada and Hong Kong.