Welcome to
Pewley Meadows
The Friends of Pewley Meadows association
The Friends of Pewley Meadows association is a community group that exists to help preserve Pewley Meadows. Working with Surrey Wildlife Trust, the lessee, we help to achieve our shared vision of conservation, education and access for the local community.
A wildlife corridor to allow species to thrive
The green hills forming the northern slopes of the North Downs, or as we now call them, Pewley Meadows, can be seen from far and wide across Guildford and provide an attractive setting for the town. The proximity of this beautiful countryside to the town centre is one of Guildford's biggest assets, providing a wonderful amenity for the residents and attracting tourists to the area.
These fields act as a vital buffer and wildlife corridor for the rare chalk grassland immediately to the south on Pewley Down. Rare species thrive here, such as the horseshoe vetch, shown here, which is a native plant essential to the life cycle of the scarce and iconic chalk-hill blue butterfly.
The Chalkhill Blue butterfly
The meadows are also open chalk grassland, a priority habitat for UK biodiversity. This special landscape supports a wide range of wild life, including two species of bird with the highest conservation priority in the UK - the skylark and linnet - as well as unusual butterflies, including the grizzled skipper and chalk hill blue (seen right).
A safe haven
As well as the usual foxes, badgers and roe deer the area is used for foraging by both pippistrelle and noctule bats and the surrounding hedgerows and trees are home to endangered dormice. The scabious bee (seen left) is an endangered species of pollinator that thrives on this type of chalk grassland.
Our vision
When our community group came together in April 2021 to try and buy the fields immediately east of Guildford, the vision for this purchase has been our focus from the word go.
The vision was to protect the fields from development and create an area that nurtures rare British wildlife, offers educational opportunities, and provides additional amenity space for the people of Guildford.
Our community group was a consortium made up of our main donor and conservationist Julia Stephenson, local residents, Pewley Down Conservation Volunteers, Guildford Environmental Forum and Holy Trinity Pewley Down School. Together we agreed that we wanted to save the fields (since renamed as Pewley Meadows) to ensure their preservation as a green space for the local community.
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Help us to buy a viewfinder!
We are hoping to put a viewfinder installation at the view point in the Eastern meadows (under the Beech trees alongside the Burgess Way walk), together with a new bench. We hope this will encourage walkers to stop for a minute and enjoy the far reaching views across swathes of the home counties and Thames Valley. To help them we are planning a panoramic guide to some of the vista in front of them, which includes far away hills, the Wembley Arch on a clear day and other points of interest.
Click here to go to our JustGiving page and learn more about the plans.
© 2021 Friends of Pewley Meadows
