I have something really important to share with you...

For the last six months we have been working on trying to make an amazing dream come true

One of the last surviving in-tact dale head Lakeland farms is on the market - it is at the top of our valley

We wanted to buy it as a community and restore it as an amazing place for people, nature-friendly farming and for our community

It seemed impossible because the asking price was £2m

And we didn’t have any money

But we got the support of two amazing organisations to help fund the dream

@CRTBarton
@FriendsofLakes

And we bid the farm to £2.5m against another bidder

We also built a dream team of experts on upland nature and upland farming to develop the vision for the valley and to manage it should we have been successful

And carefully tried to ensure we didn’t compete with other local farmers and charities

It felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity - to implement all that we as a community had learnt in recent years

Restoring hay meadows
Restoring rivers/flood plains
Creating wood pasture
Supporting a farming family as tenants
And making it a model of what a farm could be

And sustaining the Herdwick sheep heritage of this special place with active and skilled commoning

But it seems to we have fallen short of realising our dream

Another bidder (possibly a charity we haven’t spoken to) has bid £2.6m and we can’t in good faith continue bidding the place up to silly levels as it will cost a lot to restore it

I am a little broken hearted today... it felt like it was a special dream of how our community could breathe new life in to that much loved farm and valley - taking charge of our own fate and owning the challenges

And we were keen to share that journey with you all

I want to say a huge thanks to everyone involved for trying to help this dream to come true

We had an awesome group behind the scenes with everything from sheep farmers to ecologists all ready to collaborate and do something special

There are only a handful of such farms left in our UNESCO World Heritage landscape and we wanted to avoid its loss - by doing what some of the Scottish communities have done and bought and managed a chunk of their own landscapes

None of us wanted to gain personally from the idea - quite the opposite, we wanted to devote ourselves to it for free

We just love the place

Thank you to all the really special people who helped behind the scenes

You know who you are, and we nearly pulled this off